Help build a new vision for Queenslanders with disability and their families

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About Blue Skies The Blue Skies Scenario is a vision for an inclusive community. It was developed by the Blue Skies Group as a community response to the call for an alternative future for people with disability, their families and supporters.

The Blue Skies Group

In June 2009, a handful of concerned Queenslanders came together for the Blue Skies Scenario Building Activity, which aimed to build a new vision for Queenslanders with disability and their families.

The Blue Skies Group (as they have come to be known), includes representatives from a broad cross section of the disability sector, including:

• people with disability;
• their families and carers;
• service providers;
• peak body representatives;
• advocates;
• public servants;
• academics; and
• other committed individuals.

The group's goal was to establish a scenario that would ask people to consider an alternative vision for people with disability, their families and supporters. You are invited to share your vision.

For Queenslanders to live the proposed scenario, the quality of leadership and engagement from both government and community sectors is critical. We are committed to comprehensive engagement of both the disability sector and the broader community, including government, to gain a better understanding of what an inclusive community means for people.

Moving from vision to reality will require, among other things:

• an acknowledgement that step change/transformation is required;
• transparency and a willingness to scrutinise current policy, practice, and reforms underway;
• willingness to explore new ways of working;
• willingness to allow evidence and the needs of people with disability inform policy and practice;
• willingness to align government investment with the vision; and
• commitment to the developmental work and capacity building required across the entire community to make the vision a reality.

The Blue Skies process

When the Blue Skies Group came together for three days in early June 2009, each came with a shared commitment and sense of responsibility for creating a community and service delivery system that is responsive to the needs of all people with disability in Queensland. During the workshop, the group developed three scenarios:

1. Audacious Entitlement, which emphasised entitlement, citizenship and a total rethink in urban design;
2. Connect M.E. (Myself and Everyone) which focused on the central role of family, friends and a home in achieving quality of life; and
3. Beyond the Bridge, with its underpinning reliance on strengths based community development as a path to full participation for people with disability.

The values and assumptions developed by each scenario group had such a consistent thread throughout each of the three scenarios that there was little to gain by keeping them separate.

While every effort has been made to capture the essence of all three scenarios, the unfolding story is told as one - the Blue Skies Scenario. While there was no attempt to establish consensus, this story represents the collective wisdom of the Blue Skies Group.

Find out more about how the ongoing evolution of Blue Skies here.