Margins To the Mainstream Project – Women’s Health East & Women with Disabilities Victoria
Health promotion action 3 is about empowering communities to have more ownership and control over their health and health services. This project provides guidance to practitioners on best practice ways to elevate the voices of women with disabilities in their work.
Women’s Health East (WHE) led the ‘Margins to the mainstream: Preventing violence against women with disabilities’ project in partnership with Women with Disabilities Victoria and the Together for Equality and Respect (TFER) partnership. The intersectional health promotion project has amplified the voices of women with lived experience of disabilities and built capacity across the 30 regional TFER partners to contribute to the prevention of violence against women with disabilities.
Since 2020, the project has directly reached an estimated 1,962 people who took part in a program, event or capacity-building initiative, and indirectly reached over 182,471 people via social media, billboard exposure and distribution of program materials.
‘Margins to the Mainstream’ Project, Women’s Health East and Women with Disabilities Victoria.
In September 2023, the project launched a key resource that was co-designed with women with disabilities, Asking the experts: A guide to best practice co-design and consultation with women with disabilities. The resource increases capacity in best practice co-design and consultation with women with disabilities and is aimed at council, health, community health and other specialist services in Melbourne’s east. It outlines a set of eight essential practices that enable ethical effective work with wide-ranging benefits. The launch of the guide included capacity-building for the 47 specialist, council and community health workers in attendance.
Evaluation showed an increase in confidence in applying best practice when engaging with women with disabilities for attendees, with an average increase of 1.1 points in a 5-point scale pre- and post-event. Eighty per cent of respondents (n=22) identified an increase in confidence in applying best practice in this area.
‘Margins to the Mainstream’ Project, Women’s Health East and Women with Disabilities Victoria.
The actions highlighted above are only part of the larger project. Further information and resources can be found at: https://whe.org.au/tfer/margins-to-the-mainstream/