For older people in remote and historically marginalised communities, the barrier to aged care is rarely distance alone — it’s trust. Communities like Jubullum, Bonalbo, Drake and Urbenville in the Northern Rivers carry generations of experience with government systems that have failed or harmed them. For these communities, a service can be fully funded, fully compliant and still go unused, because trust wasn’t built into the delivery model from the start.

This presentation shares how HART Services, a profit-for-purpose provider in the Northern Rivers, has treated trust not as a soft outcome but as core infrastructure — designed, resourced and measured alongside logistics and compliance. It will walk through practical mechanisms HART has built: a cultural safety CHSP service agreement developed specifically for communities with historical distrust of government systems; the “Community Dividend” model, which returns brokerage surplus directly to Support at Home clients as a tangible demonstration of shared benefit; and the navigation of a real pricing justification case with the Department of Health for remote service delivery in the Jubullum/Drake/Mallanganee corridor, where standard pricing models don’t reflect the true cost of reaching these communities.

Delegates will leave with a practical framework for assessing where their own service models assume trust rather than build it, and concrete examples of agreements, pricing arguments and financial models that can be adapted for other remote and diverse-community contexts.