As we celebrate 75 years of empowering lives, Denise West, General Manager CIRC National Services, takes us on a journey through the origins of Scope's Communication and Inclusion Resource Centre (CIRC) and the remarkable impact it's had on the disability community.
As a young child, I learned sign language so I could communicate with a cousin of mine who was born profoundly deaf. This initially made me want to become a teacher of the deaf. Later, I was exposed to other people with disability during a high school work placement, and that led me to working in the disability sector.
I started working at Scope back in 1986, which was then known as the Spastic Society of Victoria. I was a Speech Pathologist at the Northern Districts Centre, which was a school and Social Connections service. The team on site included physiotherapists, occupational therapists, and a social worker. I was the only speech pathologist.
On my first day I remember being overwhelmed by the amazing care and support our staff provided to the children and adults.
They treated everyone, especially the school children, like their family. If children came from disadvantaged families and they didn’t bring in lunch, the staff would always cook meals for them.
During that time, I learnt a lot about disability. I watched and learnt how staff interacted so well with clients who couldn’t speak. I also learnt a lot about Italian and Greek culture, as we had a very diverse client group.
I was privileged to know and work with two amazing women who dedicated their lives and careers to supporting people who were non-verbal. We owe a lot to the work and research led by Hilary Johnson and Karen Bloomberg, who were both Speech Pathologists working at Scope.
They were instrumental in establishing COMPIC (COMmunication PICtographs), the first Australian symbol system for communication in Victoria, which Scope funded. COMPICs are line drawings and images which represent words. The team at Glen Allen Special school, led by Karen and Hilary, developed communication boards using stickers. They drew on them with pens and used them to enable children to learn about language and communicate their choices, dreams, and goals. The communication boards also included photos of important people and family members. It created a language and an environment for children to communicate with when they didn’t have spoken language. These types of communication aids are still used today, although they are much more sophisticated.
We also conducted a demographic study to understand the number of people who had complex communication needs across Victoria. It was the first study of its type, and it led to the Victorian government funding a hub-and-spoke model of Speech Pathology services across Victoria. The model focused on building the capacity of services to be inclusive and accessible for people with communication disabilities.
This funding also enabled us to teach and train undergraduate Speech Pathologists in Augmentative and Alternative Communications (AAC), and work with Speech Pathologists across Victoria to build their skills and knowledge on complex communication needs and disability. This was a significant step in making Speech Pathology more accessible to people with complex communication needs across Victoria.
The Communication and Inclusion Resource Centre came about through the desire to make systemic changes.
At the time, a lot of health services for people with a disability were specialist and segregated. We saw a real need for systematic and societal change. To move away from segregated group services (institutions) to the human rights-based principle that people with a disability should be able to access the same services as everyone else in their community.
CIRC was established through a commitment by Scope and my leadership team to focus on educating and building the capability of communities and mainstream services to include people with communication disabilities.
We wanted services (whether hospitals, theatres, police stations, libraries or recreation services) to have the knowledge, skills, confidence and a positive attitude to communicate with people who have disabilities.
When we got the news that we had got the funding to enable this vision to become reality, there was a lot of hugging and screaming! We headed out to dinner to celebrate.
CIRC was first located at our Box Hill office. I remember the energy and excitement the team had to be able to do something at a systemic level. We had a lot of strategic planning sessions and spent time developing relationships outside of the disability sector.
We were able to use the funding to provide the education, tools and resources to mainstream and community services to provide inclusive and accessible services.
We’ve made a real difference in building the capability of communities and mainstream services, and we have had so many achievements to be proud of over the years.
We have partnered with many large organisations (such as Yarra Trams, V/Line, Victoria Police, banks, the Victorian Electoral Commission, Ambulance Victoria, hospitals and sporting associations) to bring about significant change and improve their customer service for people with communication disabilities.
Something that stands out to me is with work we did with the Victorian Electoral Commission. They were one of our first Easy English customers, and they wanted us to produce a ‘How to Vote’ instruction guide for local government. They initially only wanted to print 5,000 brochures but ended up doing approximately 12 more print runs because the demand was so high. It showed the need for written information to be available in Easy English for people with low literacy to enable people to exercise their constitutional rights.
From then on, the Victorian Electoral Commission really started to understand that the Victorian community had varying degrees of literacy and needed to have information presented in accessible formats. They became the early adopters of accessible information.
CIRC has employed people with disabilities to lead and design our services and products. In our disability education service, we employ people with disabilities to provide training to high school students.
We have so many wonderful people on the team who have a disability. Annie Loughen, who started as a Disability Support Worker, is now one of our disability educators. We are fortunate to have Jake, a Paralympian, in our team. Jake has just come back from Korea with a bronze medal. There are so many people who have worked with us in the past 15 years who have truly made a difference.
The bravery of our team members who have a disability to tell their stories has been one of the main factors that have changed people’s attitudes.
The introduction of the NDIS has been revolutionary, it has put choice and control in the hands of people with disability.
The awarding of a recent ILC (Information Linkages and Capacity Building) grant from the Department of Social Services has enabled us to co-design resources and training tools. We use these to assist businesses to be confident and knowledgeable to recruit and retain people with communication disability and low literacy.
I would like to see more people with a disability in leadership roles, and increased employment opportunities for people with communication difficulties. I would like to see this not just at Scope but across Australia.
Going forward, I hope we can achieve universal accessibility so that people with a disability don’t face barriers to accessing mainstream services. The other thing I’d like to see is that people with a disability are seen and recognised for their contribution to society.
75 years from now, I hope that people with a disability will have the same opportunities to live as I do!
As we mark Scope’s 75th birthday, we sat down with Robert Moore, Senior Manager Government Relations, to chat about his extensive career at Scope, and the changes he’s within the organisation and disability sector.
As we celebrate Scope’s 75th anniversary, we are joined by Jenni Hendy, General Manager of Accommodation Services, who has shared her story about her journey with Scope.
As Scope marks its 75th anniversary, we highlight the stories of the people who make Scope the organisation it is today. We sat down with Paul Elliott to hear about his extensive career and contribution to the organisation.
