Tag: Inclusion

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News & Announcements

Business Start-up Awards create career opportunities

As they Celebrated International Day of People with a Disability, on Tuesday 3 December, Good Sammy Enterprises (previously Good Samaritan Industries) awarded their inaugural Good Sammy Business Start-up Awards to young people living with a disability inspiring pathways to their working future.

With final exams over and the school year complete, and while thousands of Western Australia’s school leavers are considering their future career opportunities, Good Sammy’s Start-Up Award winners will be making use of their prize money to turn their passions into a business opportunity. These awards are kindly sponsored and supported by Santos.

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Stories & Feature Articles

Looking for people with room in their hearts and their homes

UnitingCare West’s Futures Foster Care service is looking for people with empathy and compassion to provide a home to young people with high care needs who are no longer able to live with their families.

Futures provides long-term disability and therapeutic foster care options for children and young people who may have significant trauma and abuse histories, as well as developmental, physical and/or medical care needs.

Neil and Beth Reynolds fostered their first child around 18 years ago, after raising five children of their own. They now share their lives with five foster children, aged 29, 11, 10, seven and five.

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Social Impact

Rainbow Lunches: an adventure changing lives

UnitingCare West’s Rainbow Lunch celebrated its 20th anniversary this month. Around 100 past and present volunteers and friends gathered at Maylands Mt Lawley Uniting Church to mark the occasion.

Rainbow Lunches are a social group, set in churches, inviting people who are experiencing mental illness or loneliness to join them for lunch and a chance to connect with other people in the community.

Larissa Muir, Senior Project Officer NDIS Transition at UnitingCare West, said that Rainbow has quietly evolved over the past 20 years, beginning with a focus on befriending people living with mental illness and now expanding to other areas to include people in all sorts of situations, such as those who are vulnerable to homelessness, those who have exited prison, as well as people that have battled physical illness or are awaiting a transplant.

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Stories & Feature Articles

Diversity, inclusivity and humour in the Bible

We know that Jesus was a storyteller, but was Jesus funny? Is there humour in the Bible?

Rev John Bell, international theologian, musician and social justice advocate, thinks so, and will be in the country soon to tell us why. He’ll be setting off on an Australian and New Zealand tour in May. Despite the challenging time difference from WA, John shared some of his passions for the church, from his home base of Glasgow, Scotland.

John has been a member of the Iona Community for 50 years. On top of that he’s worked for the community as a resource worker in the areas of worship, spirituality and social justice. He’s also a published author, a regular radio broadcaster and a songwriter of many hymns – some of which we regularly use in worship here in the Uniting Church WA.

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Stories & Feature Articles

5 ways to make your church more accesible

San Diego, California, United States - September 6th 2011: This is a photo taken in the studio of the apple iPad II with a classic King James Bible facing the camera on a white background. The iPad is a touchscreen tablet with internet capability and can be used for watching movies, listening to music, reading books, playing games and can run a variety of applications.

Dr Scott Hollier, Digital Access Specialist and member at Kalamunda Uniting Church, shares his five top tips for making church more accessible for people with vision impairments.

As a young Christian in the 90s, there was great community support in helping me understand my early Christian journey. As a person with a degenerative eye condition, there wasn’t much opportunity back then for the materials to be designed in a way that worked with my failing eyesight.

While the support of my church has remained steadfast all these years, something that has changed in a positive way is technology and the
wealth of opportunity to make worship accessible to congregation members with disability or seniors that may have difficulties seeing or hearing
the service.

In a similar way to installing a wheelchair ramp at a church entrance, reviewing and improving your digital processes can significantly strengthen the
message of support and inclusivity as we continue to become more reliant on digital content.

As such, I’ve put together my top five tips on how you can improve your content to support the one in five Australians with some form of disability – many of which are likely to be coming along to your service.

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Stories & Feature Articles

Side by side in the everyday

L’Arche Australia is an ecumenical movement building community for people living with and without intellectual disabilities. Rather than a service provider, L’Arche encourages people to share life together – all the joys, sadness and mundane tasks we experience throughout our day-to-day lives.

‘Friends of L’Arche Perth’ has been meeting since 2003, and has built a strong network around regular gatherings and worship. The group are now at a stage where they are looking into how they could invite people into permanent accommodation together – one of the characteristics of the global L’Arche movement.

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