Bites: June and July 2002

Employment

DPA believes that it is the right of all persons with disabilities to have the opportunity to be engaged in productive and meaningful employment which provides flexibility, equal opportunity and career path development.

Change at Workbridge

New chief executive at Workbridge, Ruth Harrison, is making her mark on our national employment organisation for people with disabilities. Ruth wrote this article for DPA Bites at the special request of DPA chief executive, Gary Williams.

Workbridge has been making some changes. Before I talk a little about those changes, there are some things that haven't changed and should not change.

Workbridge is a not-for-profit organisation,
Workbridge helps people with disabilities find jobs in the open labour market
Workbridge is a contracted disability service provider.

Some of the changes have been to Workbridge's constitution. Instead of having a Board appointed by the Minister we now have a Council and a Board that is appointed by the Council.

We have both a Council and Board because the Council's role is to keep an eye to the future and give us our direction and the Board takes care of the day-to-day governance as any other Board.

DPA has the Presidency of the Workbridge Council for three years and under the constitution at least 51 percent of Council members must have a disability. Robyn Hunt has been our President and as she has been appointed to the Human Rights Commission and has resigned, we are waiting for DPA to appoint the next President of Workbridge.

The other changes to Workbridge are that we are working hard to continue to improve the quality of our service to those who use it. We are also looking at how we can get services to those that currently can't get any service.

We will not be considering opening new branches but look at ways to use technology.

In summary, having made changes to the constitution our whole focus is on improving the quality of services to you. We want the partnership between DPA and Workbridge to be alive and strong.

DPA membership guidelines explained

The National Secretariat of DPA has been sorting out the details of "operationalising" the new membership categories for the full and associate members

We are going to assume all corporate will be associate members unless they supply us with a copy of their rules or constitution that show us they are entitled to full membership. Corporates are entitled to full membership if their governance arm e.g. executive committee or board has a majority of disabled people.

For individual members and families we are going to leave it up to regional assemblies to decided what category people belong in.

New DPA membership forms for individuals will now have a space for members to fill out their ethnicity if they wish. It's just so we can collect that kind of data Gary Williams says.

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