Disability guide empowering people to achieve employment goals
Multiple Solutions, a Disability Employment Services provider, has worked with Feros Care, an NDIS partner in the Community, to deliver the Talking About Your Disability, Your Way project.
This Talking About Your Disability, Your Way guide is a practical guide to help people on their path to achieving employment, study, or volunteer goals. The project aims to empower people to have a voice in overcoming roadblocks, and to promote self-advocacy and inclusivity.
The guide provides tools to assist people to discuss their disability and identify and articulate their goals and the supports available to help achieve them. This guide has been broken up into three sections to allow people to:
- get to know who their support people are
- create networks that support them to enter employment, volunteer work and study
- identify their goal or goals and any possible roadblocks
- give guidance in sharing information about their disability and/or impairment
- create schedules and working targets to help reach their goals
- celebrate the goals they have achieved.
When supporting people living with a disability, injury or illness to find and secure sustainable employment, Multiple Solutions Regional Manager Sarah Moyle explained the first step is to help our participants share their goals and break them down into achievable outcomes.
“One of our objectives in creating the guide was to be able to assist participants to be motivated in reaching their goals,” Sarah said.
“It will also be an excellent way to engage with employers to understand people’s disability in an individualised way.”
The Talking About Your Disability Your Way guide was created through collaboration with people with disability, local community, and mainstream organisations. Multiple Solutions engaged their participants and Employment Consultants to support the research behind the development of this guide.
Together Sarah and Feros Care Community Development Coordinator (CDC), Carly Grose explained, “We learnt quickly through consultation that people entering study, employment, or volunteer work often had further goals.”
“We found that people had transferable skills they wanted to demonstrate to show their abilities to get to their next steps. This is a key element that was incorporated into the guide.”
The guide contains tools to assist people in sharing information about their disability, identifying their goals and the supports available to help them achieve employment, volunteer work or study. The guide can be used as a working document, with pages to take notes and various tools to help people better understand and gather their thoughts.
The guide not only supports the user to understand roadblocks when starting employment, volunteer work or study but also helps their supporters to understand how to help remove these roadblocks to achieving their goals.
“Not only is this guide intended to assist Local Area Coordinators’ nationally, but it is intended to inspire the wider community and a broad range of services to support people with disability in sharing their individualised stories,” Carly said.
“We have intentions for the guide to roll-out nationally, not only in our own businesses but to other services that would benefit from a guide to support their own participants, clients, students and the wider community.”
Download the Talking About Your Disability, Your Way Guide here.
