NDIS and employment with NDIA’s Chair Denis Napthine

In May I met with the Chair of the National Disability Insurance (NDIA) Board Dr Denis Napthine AO at the CID office.

The meeting with my CID colleagues Liz Evans, Jim Simpson, Lizzie Spasich and our Vice Chair Stephen Cooke.

We wanted to talk to Denis about CID’s involvement in the NDIS and the experiences of our members with the NDIS.

We talked about a lot of topics.

We talked about the inclusion of people with intellectual disability.

We talked about health, housing, and people in the justice system.

Denis really wanted to know about employment.

I work on the More Than Just a Job project at CID so I had a lot to say.

We talked about we offer free training to help people with intellectual disability plan their career goals and help employers hire people with intellectual disability.

I showed Denis some great planning tools people can use to help think about what job they might like.

Denis took some of these tools home as well as our ME360 cards.

We also talked to Denis about the things that need to be better for people with intellectual disability.

There should be better support from DES services for people with intellectual disability.

DES means Disability Employment Service.

We said that it can take longer to support people with intellectual disability to get a job, so they should get more help from a DES.

I talked about my experience with a DES and how they did not help me.

They did not treat me well and said I cannot work in open employment.

Open employment means working with everyone else in the community.

We also talked about how Australian Disability Enterprises should help people try open employment options.

I hope I can do something like this again.

I am very passionate about employment.

I want to speak up about people’s rights to be included in the community.

Go to the More Than Just a Job page to find about more about open employment.

To find out about CID’s work around employment go to our Jobs and Education page.

Ella

CID project worker