or what we learned over time...

Many had a son or daughter who had a disability and had grown up in their family home in this local community. They wanted them to have the same chance to keep living in this community. Some others were public servants, local politicians & community members who were supportive of these ideas and dreams. The CLP is what grew out of their outstanding lobbying efforts.

Today the CLP is a small non-government organization based at Christies Beach, which across the last 15 years has become the vehicle for helping over 60 people pursue this vision together with their families. The CLP currently assists 33 people with a particular focus on their home rather than their working lives although naturally we touch peoples work lives from time to time.

The families that gave rise to the CLP were given a real impetus for action when in 1981 a woman who was connected to these other families died, leaving a daughter who had down's syndrome, in the position of having no one to support her in her home. The young woman was well known within this local area. She now shared the ownership of the family home with a brother who lived in Sydney; and so what was actually needed was the practical and emotional support she required to enable her to manage living in her family home. In 1981 the idea of a support service that did this was unheard of. All that was promoted as available were 2 large local institutions or some appalling private boarding houses. This was not what was needed. The woman concerned didn't need somewhere else to live - she already had a home of her own.

The short version of what happened was 3-4 months after the death of her mother after enormous efforts by local families to try and help this woman, she ended up moving into a so-called "group home" with 6-8 other people in Sydney --1200km away. This was the only available accommodation in Australia that bore any resemblance - no matter how inadequate - to a home, where indeed, this woman could actually get the day to day support she needed. Naturally she suffered huge losses (especially of relationships built up over many years) and dislocation she experienced was huge. At least she was nearer to her brother.

The great tragedy is though, that if the same thing happened today, we couldn't honestly say that the outcome would necessarily be any different. Most of you know that the Institute of Health and Welfare have calculated that the costs of addressing the urgent unmet need across Australia amongst people who have a severe disability and their families would amount to approximately $300 million. While today we have the infrastructure in place - that is a service like the Community Living Project Inc. - there are not the funds available to provide this additional needed support to people.

With the benefit of 15 years of experience and hindsight, the CLP has become an organization which considers the person's needs holistically. A person's needs cannot be regarded separately from the other aspects of their life. Nor can we ignore the interrelationships between the person, their family, and their social and cultural contexts when providing support.

What the CLP has come to understand is that everyone, no matter what their level of disability, can have a home of his or her own, if only they have access to the right amount of the right support and this gets provided to them in the right way!

The CLP believes that everyone is unique and hence needs their support and living arrangements to be designed around their individuality and to come to them on an individual basis! Ultimately, the CLP desires to see people secure in their own life and community, and no longer reliant on the human service world. Ideally, the CLP would be able to make itself redundant.

How the CLP measures its success

• Is our support focussed on helping this person develop "home" for themselves?
• Are relationships a major focus in all our support to this person?
• Does our support enable people to move into roles that other community members would value and respect?
• Is our support segregating this person away from other community members?
• Are we encouraging this person's dependence on us?
• Have we helped this person develop connections with their community?
• Has our support contributed to the person being congregated with other people who have a disability or otherwise devalued?
• Have we actively worked towards this person's inclusion?
• Have we helped this person address their most pressing needs first, and was the process used individualised?
• Does this person play a major role in making decisions about what should happen and how?
• Does each person's family, where appropriate, play a major role in these decisions?
• Does our support encourage a positive relationship between the person and their family?
• Do we as a service and as individual workers stand by the person in times of need?
• Are we, the organisation and the worker, the focal point in this person's life?
• In our personal lives, do we reflect the same values that we ask of other community members?

We need to be cautious that we do not fall into thinking that it will be us that will change the world.

As an organization and indeed as individual Board members and employees, we may well hope to have a generous, motivating, thoughtful and helpful presence alongside of people. However, ideally their world shouldn't have us at its centre, or crumble without us.