First Peoples Disability Network Australia (FPDN) is a national organisation of and for Australia’s First Peoples with disability, their families and communities. The organisation is governed by First Peoples with lived experience of disability.
June Reimer, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of FPDN, spoke to Peer Connect about their DSO project in the Northern Territory.
“FPDN has been working in the Northern Territory since 2014. Our work has taken us across the Barkly region visiting and holding workshops and community yarning sessions in Tennant Creek, Ali Curung, Elliot, Utopia. There are twenty-one skin/family groups in these communities and across Alice Springs”.
“The DSO project in the Northern Territory was always going to be about growing connections in community first, as this is the cultural way. The regions that we visited in building relationships involved acknowledging and respecting the song lines for these remote areas that are steeped in traditional business. Knowing that traditional art was the connection in community, we built our project around storytelling and the local Aboriginal art centres, where people with disability most frequented”.
“We came up with the concept of “talking pictures” to enable people with a disability to think about and develop their personal story to understand how they might navigate the NDIS in a way which was meaningful for our people. We acknowledged that everybody has their own personal story which needed to be told and expressed within the concept of NDIS planning for individual supports and to build people’s potential to access the community.”
“Through art we could crossover the language barrier of English not being a first language and build confidence of people telling their story of how they keep strong in community. The result was the development of postcards below of local artists with disability telling their story from the many language regions of the Barkly; these are included in a package of resources that enable the Aboriginal community, NDIA or service providers to have visual cues for starting conversations around how each person can be supported in community, culturally first.”