Information and Advocacy Project for Young blind Australians

Project Overview

Written by: Michael Curran, with assistance from Amy Ni and Mathew Mirabella
Friday February 17 2006.

Introduction

The Information and Advocacy Project for Australian Blind Youth was started in January of this year by Amy Ni, Mathew Mirabella and myself. We are a group of blind people who are interested in issues faced by blind youth. Although some of us are currently on various blind youth committees, when starting the project we decided that the opinions we hold would be completely independent of these committees.

The idea for the project has come from many hours of talking amongst ourselves (and with other blind Australians), discussing issues related to blind youth in Australia. In these discussions we have identified issues such as:

Braille literacy -- the move towards computers with speech, with little regard for the importance of Braille
Standard of education -- what differences are there in the standard and level of education between specialist schools and mainstream schools, within Australia? What implications do these differences have on the future of a blind student?
Role models -- young blind people lack the support from older blind role models, partly because of a trend towards mainstream schooling
Parent support -- support groups exist for parents of blind children, but there is not much support for parents from older blind people
Advocacy -- older blind people have many avenues of advocacy, but young blind people do not have nearly as much
Adaptive technologies and independent living skills -- blind people are mostly taught independent living skills by sighted people; this also goes for getting opinions on the most suitable adaptive technologies

For a more in-depth look at these issues, why not have a read through some writings that have been written by us or other people interested in the project.

A National Blind Youth Officer

For many years, Blind Citizens Australia (BCA) has been the peak body representing blind people in both individual and systemic advocacy. And over the last six or so years, special interest branches have formed in BCA to support blind youth. Although these branches such as: Young blind Citizens Victoria (YBCV) and Young Blind Citizens Queensland (YBCQ) have been very successful in forging important social networks, and also holding many informative and varied information/social events. However, work was always very limited due to the voluntary capacity of each committee and its members.

With our experiences in BCA and YBCV, we noticed that year after year a lot of the same issues came up again and again. As much as we would have liked to have worked on them, we either did not have the time or the know how. These issues are quite complex, and call for people with lots of time and expertise. This is why the main task in this project is to try to work with BCA to create a national youth officer, to tackle many of these issues and coordinate other blind youth projects.

We have not as yet approached the BCA board about the youth officer position. But once we have enough feedback from interested people about the project we will do so, and then can pursue essential funding from external sources.

At the moment we envisage that the youth officer would work full time (depending on funding) on the following issues:

Advocating on behalf of blind youth -- this could include problems with: schools, other blindness agencies, integration aides, or higher level people such as government. If the problem is not actually youth related, then the youth officer could at least liaise with the client whilst communicating the problem to the more appropriate channels in BCA. Young blind people would be able to contact the youth officer by telephone, mail, email and or by appointment
Keeping an Updated Record of all Services and Support Groups -- this publicly available record would contain contacts for services and support groups in categories such as parent support, peer support, mentoring, services for blind students in mainstream schooling, and many more
Promoting Functions and Events -- this includes functions and events held by BCA youth branches, camps and other recreation/information activities with a focus on blind youth
Coordinate Speakers -- older blind youth could speak about their experiences at many different seminars, to do with teaching blind children, bringing up your own blind child, working with blind youth in the community etc. The youth officer could keep a record of interested people in each state who would be willing to speak
Coordinate Mentors -- a record could be kept of interested older blind youth who are willing to talk to younger blind youth. People could be matched up based on commonalities such as: interests, hobbies, subjects at school, or vision level. Other slightly larger groups could be coordinated to allow the sharing of knowledge and experiences on a slightly wider level

>From time to time there may be larger projects the youth officer may have to run or coordinate, but the above points are the most important ones overall that we have identified.

National Steering Committee

Because the youth officer is only one person, and because they may not necessarily be blind themselves, we think that it is important that the youth officer be steered by a national committee of interested blind people. Although we have not yet worked out a good structure for this committee, we do know that most likely the majority will be youth and it must allow for at least one representative from each state or territory.

The national steering committee will exist to oversee the work of the youth officer, and to come up with new ideas and projects relating to the issues of today for blind youth. The steering committee and the youth officer could meet up by telephone once a month and also perhaps try and meet face to face at BCA national conventions.

Suggestions and Feedback

If you have any ideas about this project, or would like to participate somehow, please feel free to contact us

We are open to and welcome any feedback, suggestions, comments, ideas about the position/role of the youth officer, or possible project ideas.

Please note: in this document "blind" denotes any Australian who is legally blind, "youth" denotes any person from the age of 0 to 30.