Achieve Australia’s leadership in the sector

The Paul Ramsay Foundation have generously awarded The Achieve Foundation a $2.8million grant to support the establishment and pilot phase of our Employment Catalyst – an initiative to increase open employment opportunities for people with disability starting with the disability service sector.
 
We are joined in this program by three leading providers who are committed to meeting an initial target of 15% of their workforce being people with disability. Over the next two years, Life Without Barriers, Yooralla and Achieve Australia have committed to employing 600 people with disability, with an additional 200 in training.

“We are excited to be creating meaningful employment opportunities and career pathways for young people with disabilities in the human services sector. Being part of this great initiative will help demonstrate to other sectors the untapped potential that inclusive employment practices can unlock, and the benefits for the whole community,” Jo-Anne Hewitt GAICD CEO, Achieve Australia CEO .

Achieve welcomed the Quality Champions Program team to our operations in late 2021 and at the same time introduced an initiative unique to Australia.

Quality Champions work in pairs - a person with disability in the role of Quality Champion and a person without disability in the role of Quality Champion Partner.

The pairs visit clients in their homes to discuss the services they receive and co-write a report based on this feedback with their recommendations for improvements, which are taken up by our frontline staff.

The Champions re-interview our clients at a later date to ask if the improvements are meeting their expectations.

Quality Champions is based on the well-established Quality Checkers program in the UK. Achieve was involved in a pilot program in 2018. We used the learnings from the pilot to develop a program tailored to our clients.

We are working with Specialist Disability Accommodation (SDA) provider, Inclusive Housing Australia (IHA), to increase the availability and quality of disability accommodation that promotes inclusion.

For example, land has been purchased at Casino in the Northern Rivers as the site for a purpose-built home for clients in the region. We have been speaking to clients and families and IHA about features the new home should include and there is a lot of excitement about the possibilities.

Future Housing is also exploring new housing options for clients in Sydney including providing opportunities for those wanting to move from a group setting to accommodation suited to 2 housemates with more private amenities.

Bringing inclusion to life for our clients is our passion and purpose but we want all people with disability to experience belonging as welcomed members of society.

To do this, Achieve Australia established a new foundation in 2021 to take part in and fund research and innovation to dismantle barriers to inclusion.

The Achieve Foundation is focused on 2 key areas that impact inclusion – housing and supports and community attitudes and mindsets. The Foundation is also building a coalition of like-minded collaborators that includes people with disability, academics, researchers and philanthropists. Achieve Australia and Inclusive Housing Australia are part of the coalition. We will work with the Foundation to test new models of service delivery and other innovations designed to create a more inclusive society.