What is co-design?
Co-design underpins everything FSSI does.
So what is it?
Why is it important?
Find out more about co-design in this FSSI explainer.
What is co-design? HTML accessible version
Victoria’s Disability Workforce – What you need to know
What’s part of Victoria’s largest and fastest growing industry, contributes significantly to the economy and is in massive demand?
Victoria’s disability workforce!
(NB – is also hugely undervalued.)
Check out a few fast facts about the workforce here.
May 2018
Who cares? Who pays? Home and Community Care
It was a full house and an energised discussion at our Home and Community Care (HACC) forum. Despite delivering vital services for over 40 years, reforms have left HACC with an increasingly uncertain future, despite growing need for its services.
Poor pay and conditions mean the workforce is desperately short-changed and short of workers, putting services at threat for people who need them to live independently in the community. Its future as a local government provided service is also under threat.
View the recorded forum session here.
VCOSS Budget Breakfast with the Treasurer
FSSI Director David Hayward was part of the guest panel at VCOSS’ Budget Breakfast with Victorian Treasurer Tim Pallas, advocating strongly 
for the social service workforce to be better recognised for the valuable contribution it makes to the community and the economy. You can view VCOSS’ recording of the Treasurer’s address here, with David Hayward and the guest panel joining VCOSS CEO Emma King on stage at the 57 minute mark.
January 2018
Insight into Acquired Brain Injury
By Christine Durham and Paul Ramcharan
Insight into Acquired Brain Injury offers an empowering approach to working with people with an acquired brain injury (ABI) based upon the views and perspectives of people with ABI themselves. Drawing upon Christine Durham’s own ABI experience and Paul Ramcharan’s extensive disability research, this volume gives voice to 36 participants with ABI, as well as carers and other professionals.
Ready-to-adopt-and-adapt scripts, guided interviews, research checklists, thinking tools and other innovative techniques help engage with people and colleagues about brain injury to support them to feel and fare better. With compassion and firsthand awareness, Insight into Acquired Brain Injury deepens understanding and translates the complicated life-worlds of people living with ABI to motivate, empower and increase their participation.
About the authors
Christine Durham found her life turned upside down after a horrific car accident. She was left with a broken brain, broken body and broken spirit – a shattered shadow of her old self. Her books share stories of how she found herself and her voice. She now speaks to a wide range of audiences including community groups, academic, medical, business and educational professionals. Durham is passionate about raising awareness of the overwhelming footprint of traumatic brain injury and road trauma.
Paul Ramcharan is Deputy Director of Research at the Future Social Service Institute and Associate Professor at the Centre for Applied Social Research at RMIT University. His 25 years’ of research with people with disability has a strong focus on advocacy, empowerment, human rights and choice. In the UK Paul coordinated a national research initiative to support implementation of Valuing People, an English white paper to improve the lives of people with intellectual disability. At FSSI Paul develops co-design in research processes to establish empowering practice through both research and action.
Conceptions of Care
What happens when we apply a feminist lens to the shifting arrangements for care? Director of the University of Sheffield’s Centre for International Research on Care, Labour and Equalities, Sue Yeandle, lifted the lid on this important topic.
View the Conceptions of Care lecture slides here.
Lessons from the UK
In August 2017, International Fellow Dr Shereen Hussein highlighted lessons Australia can learn from the UK as it enters the NDIS market-based system of providing services for people with disability.
View key presentations here from Dr Hussein’s visit.
Public lecture – A workforce for the future (30 August)
Advocacy’s role in ensuring choice, control and safeguarding of service users
Personal budgets and their impact on users and workers
Worker engagement, burnout and personal accomplishments among social workers
The Value of Data for informing policy and practice
Designing accessible and usable data for researchers (Mohamed Ismail)