KYEEMA Support Services has ambitious plans to expand into a brand new building on its West Portland site – but the hard part will be working out from where to get the money.

As it welcomes back participants to its Lalor St headquarters as damage from the January 6 storm is gradually repaired, the disability services provider is experiencing a boom in its services that is outgrowing the five-decade-old building.

“We’re looking for $5 million to fund a new building,” said chief executive Julie Amor.

“Within the next 10 years we want to replace this one.”

Corporate services manager Gay Kelly said Kyeema was growing substantially.

“We’ve got over 100 and growing here (at Lalor St) and 115 staff,” she said.

“We’re just bursting at the seams.

“Even the aged community we have here they have limited facilities.

“If we had bigger facilities we’d be able to offer more activities to people that don’t want to participate in the regular day program.

“This is 53 years old and lots of other facilities have been upgraded over the years but ours hasn’t.

“It’s time to get some modern facilities. We’ve got quite a bit of land.”

Ms Amor said Kyeema – which has about 190 participants, some of who are looked after in their own homes – would have to go through a few different routes to fund the building.

“There’s no one who actually funds this sort of thing,” she said.

“We can either go to the philanthropics, do our own fundraising, or trying to find a government grant.

“Regional Development Victoria are trying to help us too.

“The first thing we want to do is try to get together enough money to get together a master plan – that will be tens of thousands of dollars – then do stakeholder consultation about use of the facilities and whether we can get some community use out of it especially as the West Portland area is growing so fast with so many houses (being built).”

 Meanwhile Kyeema has welcomed back participants to Lalor St as areas damaged by the January storm are gradually repaired.

After that storm, they initially were able to use Alexandra Park courtesy of the Westerns Football Netball Club and Kyeema’s respite house before shifting to Henty Park and the Portland Colts Cricket Club rooms in March.

However as the weather got colder and the damage started getting repaired, it was decided to bring some of the activities back to Lalor St.

“People are really happy, it’s just lovely having some activity going on,” Ms Amor said.

“(The participants) are really loving being back and it was a very happy first couple of days when they all came back in, they all had big smiles on their faces.”

As for the rest of the repairs, Ms Amor said those were progressing as well as could be expected, even as tradespeople remain hard to find.

“One good thing is the insurance company has paid us out and we’re now allowed to use local trades,” she said.

“Other people have been very kind to us and said it’s okay for us to go ahead of them (in tradies’ queues).

“We’ve been pretty fortunate that people care about Kyeema as an organisation and the sort of work that we do. It’s been good community support all around.”

Ms Amor thanked tradespeople as well as Westerns, Portland Colts and all Kyeema’s supporters for their help during the past six months.