Advocacy for Inclusion (AFI) and ACT Down Syndrome & Intellectual Disability (DSID) have made a joint submission to the Department of Health’s consultation on the Inclusive Communities Fund, endorsed by the Mental Health Community Coalition ACT.
The $200 million Fund aims to help community organisations become more welcoming and accessible to people with disability. We support that goal, but we don’t think it can be looked at on its own – it’s being introduced alongside much larger cuts to individual participation supports (Social, Civic and Community Participation and Capacity Building Daily Activity), and the Fund comes nowhere near making up for what’s being lost.
Our main concern is that the Fund only addresses one side of the equation. Making an organisation more inclusive doesn’t help if people don’t have the individual support, transport, or workforce available to actually get there and take part. This gap will be felt hardest by people with psychosocial disability, people with intellectual disability, people with fluctuating or episodic conditions, and people without strong informal support networks.
We’re recommending that the Fund clearly state it is not a replacement for individual supports, that it include funding for things like transport and peer support alongside organisational capacity-building, and that its design wait for real evidence on the impact of the cuts before funding priorities are locked in. We’re also asking the Department to be transparent about how funding will be allocated across jurisdictions, and to build in independent evaluation from the outset.
Separately, we’ve proposed the ACT as a pilot site to test how community organisations, government and disability advocates can work together on inclusion in areas like transport, sport, and the arts.
The full submission is available here.