Tara Whittaker founded NorthLine Care in 2023 — an NDIS-registered support coordination practice serving Belconnen and Gungahlin. When she came to us in early 2025 she was a one-person operation supporting 14 participants, a long Facebook waitlist, and a recurring grant rejection problem: she'd write applications late at night between client visits and lose every one to providers with dedicated grant writers.
Where she was stuck
Tara's positioning was clear in her head and invisible online. Her website was a one-pager built in Wix; her LinkedIn presence was a personal profile with no business posts; her grant applications copy-pasted boilerplate from her registration paperwork.
The applications I sent felt indistinguishable from anyone else's. I knew our model was different. I couldn't get that across in 400 words at midnight.
What changed
Tara joined the monthly Grants & Funding Office Hours at Growth Hub. We didn't write applications for her — we re-scoped the ones already in her drawer. Her ACT Community Services grant got restructured around outcomes (number of participants moved off crisis support, hours of carer respite delivered) rather than activities. Submitted in March. Funded in June.
In parallel we rebuilt her web presence. NorthLine moved onto our Foundations tier — Social AI now publishes one LinkedIn post per week pulled from a topic queue Tara approves monthly; Listing AI ensures NorthLine appears correctly across the 30+ NDIS-adjacent directories that participants and coordinators search; the website rewrite focused on the three referral pathways (self-managed participants, plan managers, and aged-care discharge planners) with a separate landing page for each.
Where she is now
Eight months in: $180K in funding across three successful applications (ACT Community Services, Hands Across Canberra, a small private foundation). NorthLine now onboards three new participants per month — steady, predictable — and Tara has hired a part-time support coordinator.
More importantly: Tara stopped writing grants at midnight. Each application now starts from a working template she keeps in her Growth Hub member portal, populated with the latest outcomes data from her own service.
Showed up to office hours with a grant draft that wasn't going anywhere. Left with a re-scoped application that got funded six weeks later.
What she said to make us write this
We asked Tara whether she'd be open to a case study because she's exactly the kind of community-services operator the Growth Hub model exists to serve — small, registered, locally trusted, and locked out of the marketing-spend tier where most NDIS competitors play. Her answer was "yes if it tells other sole-practitioners they don't need to hire a grant writer to fund the work they're already doing."
If that's you: the next Grants & Funding Office Hours is on the events page. Drop in with whatever you have.