By Barbara Harris
Parents of people with disability, carers and people with disability themselves are invited to an Open Forum on Disability Issues that will be held at Emmanuel Centre on Tuesday, July 30 from 7-9pm.
Those who have no contact with people with disability and their families and carers are also invited.
Participants in the forum will listen to one another and learn from each other what it means when people in communion make a difference.
Participants are invited to share their experiences, successes, their unmet needs, other people, their frustrations and their concerns at this Open Forum.
It is now 20 years since the Federal Disability Act was passed and still many parents, carers and people with disability have to fight for services which sadly have in some cases been denied to so many people who do not fit the criteria or live in the wrong area or who don’t have a diagnosis capable of being addressed by an agency.
In a world that measures productivity, based largely on employment and education and success as a major feature, funding is often given to an organisation on the condition that goals are achieved.
These goals are based on the commercial understanding that a person’s worth is only worth something if you receive a wage, you have a certificate and you do something a preconceived way.
Furthermore, how many Church agencies and instrumentalities offer employment opportunities for people with disability? It is hoped that the passing of the National Disability Insurance Scheme or Disability Care Australia will somehow break the fixed concentration on productivity and develop a way to meet some of the issues and needs of people with disability, families and carers.
Unfortunately for people who live in Western Australia, there is at the present time a further barrier to deal with because Western Australia has not yet signed on to the program under Disability Care Australia.
Have you ever been thrown into the deep end? I know I have been many times. It’s sink or swim. For many people it has been sink rather than swim. Confronting disability in oneself or in others can be a disaster.
The birth of a child with a disability into a family can bring with it tremendous pressures on the other members.
Fathers, for example, can feel neglected because the mother spends so much time and energy dealing with the child with a disability that she has no time or energy to be wife to her husband.
The truth is that so many people are unprepared and unskilled in being around people with disability. Faced with personal ignorance, many simply ignore people with disability.
That this should happen in secular society is bad enough; that it should occur in our Catholic communities is appalling.
This Open Forum on Tuesday, July 30 at Emmanuel Centre is free, and is an open invitation to see people with disability, perhaps for the first time.
There is the story of a shoe company that sent two representatives to a South Pacific island to find out what kind of footwear they used so that they could open a market there.
The first representative emailed back to head office that the situation was hopeless because no one wore shoes.
The second representative emailed back to head office saying that the situation was such a wonderful marketing opportunity because no one wore shoes.
When meeting people with disability many people are so taken back by their own sense of inadequacies that they fail to see the opportunity to learn so much from people with disability.
The coming forum is a wonderful opportunity for personal growth, not only in awareness of people with disability, but also an awareness that giftedness is part of our own makeup and that together we can. Come along and invite your friends too.