Celebrating International Day of people with a Disability with St John of God Accord

St John of God Accord provides compassionate support and solutions to clients and families with an intellectual disability.

St John of God Accord Chief Executive Officer Lisa Evans celebrates this day reflecting on the year and services they provide.

TRANSCRIPT:

I am proud of how we make a difference we make a difference to people’s lives, we enrich it, we give them hope, we provide services with dignity and we make their world a better world.

Celebrating the lives of people with a disability and what they contribute and bring to the world is no greater cause for celebration.

Our clients with disabilities bring so much to the world and to the community and it is our privilege to be supporting them in their journey.”

At Accord we support over 1300 clients and their families over 40 locations across metropolitan Melbourne.

We have been making a difference to people’s lives with a disability since 1953.

In providing disability services, the key ingredient is that the client is at the centre of everything that we do, they are part of the choices and they are part of the process.

We are there to make a difference to them and to really enrich their lives and provide hope and meaningful activities for them so that they can go on and reach their full potential.

We provide a true partnership with families and that is part of the unique and wonderful service at Accord, that is wraps around the client and the family and gives them all of the support that they need.

We provide services for life, we provide accommodation which is long term, we provide respite services, we provide day services, we provide support coordination to help families and clients navigate the difficult maze of NDIS, we have a host of allied health services that compliment every other part of our service delivery, we have individualised support where we tailor-make a support model for an individual in the community.

We also have a wonderful employment service that helps place people with a disability in paid employment at that is a real partnership with business, with clients and their families.

COVID-19 has provided Accord with enormous challenges as we have had to adjust to our new norm throughout the year. It is also provided a lot of opportunities.

I have seen incredible resilience in our client group, I have heard story after story after story of real innovation and where our caregivers have just gone the extra mile to ensure that the journey for our clients through COVID-19 still remained rich.

At the beginning of this we had just released our tag line ‘we are there for you’ and I said to our leadership team that this is actually our biggest opportunity to every live out our tag line and this is what our promise to ourselves is right now.

We need to be there for our families and our clients more than ever and that is what we have done this year.