Values
Participation: It is imperative that people with a disability are involved in and, to the greatest extent possible, own the decisions and activities that directly impact upon their lives. This ensures relevance to decisions made about priorities and activities, and is demonstrated to improve the sustainability of outcomes. Communities and their governments are instigators of change and also need to ensure optimal outcomes for children and adults with a disability. Awareness, commitment and knowledge are key factors in effective participation.
Partnership: Working in partnership helps to ensure the relevance of actions, build capacity, develop and share knowledge towards an inclusive society.
Mutual accountability: All individuals and organisations involved in decisions that affect children and adults with a disability are accountable to the individuals, communities and partners worked with. Inclusion Matters is committed to ensuring transparency internally within the organisation, external work, and additionally its partners.
Approaches
We believe that disability is a cross-cutting issue. Specific consideration of the needs and rights of children and adults with a disability is required in multiple sectors, including but not limited to, education, child protection, health, gender, development, poverty reduction and disaster relief.
We approach our work through both rights-based and strengths-based perspectives.
Rights-Based: In line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities a human rights approach is taken when working towards the inclusion of children and adults with disabilities in their communities. We believe that every adult and child with a disability has the same rights as those of their peers to actively participate, access mainstream and specialist services and be welcomed and included within their home and community, free from discrimination and harm.
In taking a rights-based approach we work from the assumption that children and adults with and without a disability are equally entitled to benefit from opportunities. This involves families, communities, organisations and governments working together to ensure children and adults with a disability are able to enjoy their entitlements. This is a proactive approach that does not reflect the sentiments of pity or charity based approaches.
Strengths-Based: Every child and adult has capacities, abilities and ideas. We believe that all children, adults, families and communities have individual and collective strengths that can be harnessed to ensure inclusion is effective and sustainable. The strengths-based approach ensures that children and adults with a disability and their families are paramount in contributing to relevant social change, effectively challenging stereotypes or negative concepts of disability
Our focus is on long-term outcomes that stimulate cycles of continuous improvement. We work by evidence based practice and promote the importance of evaluation measures and tracking outcomes.