Women, nonbinary and gender diverse people will often share with our support workers experiences of feeling excluded, overlooked, devalued and even ignored when accessing supports and services. This highlights a phenomena that is evident throughout the community service delivery system in Australia, which traditionally, has viewed people, and provided services organised in terms of a single attribute or issue. However, we know life is not that singular – we exist in a world in which our experiences are shaped by multiple issues at once, and that diverse individuals will be impacted in unique and specific ways according to their social locations in Australian society.
WIRE stood at the forefront of the shift of traditionally women’s organisations towards inclusivity for gender diverse and non- binary service users. Our practice was showcased in Victorian Equal Opportunity Human Rights Commission Guidelines for family violence services and accommodation as a model for compliance with the Equal opportunity Act 2010. WIRE seeks to remain a best practice community services leader. To do this, we need to do the deep de-constructing and re-constructing work needed to shed a light on the obstacles and exclusions we are unwittingly creating, embedding in institutions, and affirming as a society around people’s differences that contribute to the feeling of people not belonging. Our answer to this is an Intersectionality Action Plan.
This ground-breaking work will become a critical piece of work strengthening and delivering authentic diversity and help to advocate for an ethical, authentic and diverse future. This project will:
•Enable the Victorian Government to show case WIRE as a case study and leverage recommendations and findings to support other organisations to fully integrate intersectionality into practice.
•Enable WIRE and other organisations in future to gain deep local and contextual knowledge of representation including race, faith, age, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity and how misrepresentation can contribute to exclusion and inequity
•Improve inclusive practice and inform and infiltrate all elements of organisational strategic planning
•Strengthen organisations’ capability to deliver authentic diversity and inclusion
•Improve inclusive practice for users of WIRE creating better outcomes
•Make WIRE an employer of choice for staff and volunteers experience oppressions enabling increased diversity
•Enable WIRE to share learnings and experience with other services wishing to embark on a similar journey to embrace intersectionality inclusivity
We are aware that as a leader in this field, we have a responsibility to work openly and in a way that enables others to benefit from this progressive work. We commit to showcasing intersectional best practice and to leverage this work and share outcomes more broadly to influence broader longer term change by championing the issues and sharing recommendations on how they may be addressed. We will do this purposively with the aim of creating tools and learnings that can be used by other community services that will inevitably want to follow suit.
You can make a dollar have a $100 impact if you invest to have a ripple effect – and women and girls create that ripple effect.
Also known as Australian Women Donors Network (ABN: 28 141 197 471), Australians Investing in Women is a registered charity endorsed by the Australian Tax Office as a deductible gift recipient (DGR1) under a special listing, all donations over $2 are tax deductible.