Industry Development

"Making it happen: a community where everyone, regardless of background or disability, feels welcome, included and supported."

We aim to assist disability services across NSW to become more culturally competent and also to assist ethnic community services to understand and respond better to people with disability.

The challenges facing human service agencies are:

• NSW is becoming an increasingly diverse community with people from over 150 different countries and 25% of all people in NSW speaking a language other than English at home.
• Almost 20% of all people in Australia identify as having a disability.
• One in four people with disability (over 300,000 people) in NSW are from a non-English speaking background (NESB). Currently, only one in twenty people with disability who use disability services are from a NESB.
• Funding bodies and monitoring frameworks increasingly require a focus on fair and just outcomes for all people in the community, including people from a NESB with disability.

We do this through

• Building Cultural Competence Capacity Projects: a range of projects for NSW non-government services working for people with disability
• A range of publications and resources, most of which are available on this website
• State-wide Industry Development
• Cumberland/Prospect NESB Service Access Project
• Community Links Project
• Diversity Management Leadership Program