Update on the Future of Advocacy project from Alison Plant and Marg Scott (consultants)

Thank you to everyone who has participated in the “Future of Advocacy” workshops so far. We’ve had two meetings. 30 people participated in our Melbourne workshop on 26 August 2024, and 36 members joined online (18 September 2024).

We discussed hopes for advocacy in the future and ideas about what this could look like.

It was agreed that an ideal disability advocacy system should fundamentally be designed to uphold the human rights of people with disability.

Some of the themes regarding key principles needed in a future disability advocacy system that emerged from the discussions at the workshops include:

Independent	Empowering, proactive, resilient.
Disability led	Strengthening community, social justice
Person centred	Responsive, trauma informed/ healing informed, cultural safety and competence Focus on self-determination and building capacity
Professional and productive	Evidence based, consistency/quality practice, sustainable workforce, cohesion and collaborative with other sectors and systems, outcomes focus
Accessible	Equitable, simplified, flexible access Place based and targeted Leveraging technology and quality infrastructure to enhance access and efficiency

In the next stage of the process, we will hold a series of online workshops and invite members to share their thoughts on topics highlighted in the earlier workshops.

The proposed dates are as follows:

Thursday 31 October: 2.00 pm – 3.00 pm
Monday 4 November: 3.00 pm – 4.00 pm
Friday 8 November: 12.00 pm – 1.00 pm
Tuesday 12 November: 2.00 pm – 3.00 pm
Thursday 14 November: 3.00 pm – 3.00 pm

We will follow up shortly with details of the topics for each of these focussed workshops