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CPActive, CPA’s advocacy community, had a huge year in 2023, bringing together people with disability, families, carers, and community members to create real change.
They’ve reached people far and wide, not just community members and politicians, but also some big-name brands like Apple and Amazon. Their initiatives include launching the Blaze the Trail campaign and the Young Changemakers Program, hosting Tech Talks – the first event ever hosted by someone using eye gaze tech, hosting the World CP Day awards, and facilitating a lived experience lab.
‘Blaze the Trail’ campaign
Led by our CPActive champions, we kicked off a campaign to improve pathways from school to work for people with CP and similar disabilities in NSW We collected nearly 1,000 signatures for our petition and attracted the attention and support of policymakers in NSW.
Joined by then-Shadow Minister for Disability Inclusion Kate Washington, then-NSW Labor leader Chris Minns and Dylan Alcott, our champions made headlines and celebrated a massive win – a commitment from NSW Labor to improve the pathways from education to employment and develop specific policies to make these pathways more accessible for people living with disability.
We look forward to making these policies into a reality this year with our now elected leaders!
Launched the Young Changemakers Program
Our pilot program for youth leadership in advocacy, Young Changemakers recently celebrated its first graduating cohort of young leaders!
This is the first of its kind in Australia, a youth development and leadership program delivered for young people with CP, BY people with CP!
Over 6 months, our young leaders took the time to learn about the ins-and-outs of advocacy and we had some pretty special people involved in the program, including NDIA Chair Kurt Fearnley, human rights lawyer Rosemary Kayess, Paralympian Ben Tudhope and Minister for the NDIS, Bill Shorten.
Tech Talks – our first event hosted entirely by someone using eye-gaze technology!
We held an online event hosted by Riley Saban, disability entrepreneur and co-founder of PolySpine, using his eye-gaze technology to communicate with the audience. It was awesome to see the role tech can play to enable people with disability and it was a great opportunity to start thinking about how it could further enable us.
Hosted the World CP Day Awards
We held our online, international awards ceremony to celebrate our amazing community with host and friend of CPActive, Elly Desmarchelier. Our World CP Day Awards competition welcomed entries from all over the world for ideas about how to improve the lives of people with disability.
The winner was Maria Dalmon from Australia for her app ‘Help Connect’! We look forward to the work Maria and Remarkable will do together to bring this life-changing tech to life.
Our community came to together for a Lived experience lab
As the last event of the year, we came together as a community for a lived experience lab. We collaborated in a small-group forum to discuss our greatest challenges with technology and how we could improve it to be universally accessible. Stay tuned for more lived experience labs in the new year!
What a fabulous year. And we could not have done it without your support for CPActive and our incredible Champions– so thank you! We can’t wait to see what 2024 year brings…
Find out more about CPActive’s incredible work here.
