In Conversation With
NCBI News recently spoke to Maryanne Diamond, general manager of the international and stakeholder relations department with Vision Australia and current President of the World Blind Union, to find out more about her work with both organisations.
Maryanne Diamond spent many years employed in the information technology (ICT) sector before moving to the community sector in the late 1990s. Diamond, who is blind, has four children, one of whom is also blind. It was only when she became a parent and tried to navigate the system to find out about services and supports for children with disabilities and their families that she became interested in and involved in advocacy and moved to the community sector.
Vision Australia is the leading provider of blindness and low vision services in Australia. The organisation works in the areas of independent living, orientation and mobility, accessible information services, employment services, assistive technology training, policy and advocacy and fundraising and works closely with people who are blind or vision impaired to improve access to education, information, employment, social inclusion, transport and the physical environment.
“My department covers government relations, policy, advocacy, communications and community engagement and we have a number of people in the department. We try to foster relationships with government and we have three levels of government – local, state and federal. Different projects are administered by different levels of government so that can complicate matters. For example, local government is responsible for access to public spaces and to public libraries, the state looks after education and transport and federal government is responsible for disability, employment and welfare,” Diamond explained.
In addition to developing Vision Australia’s policies in areas such as transport, education and employment, Diamond’s department also endeavours to influence national, regional and local policy by building relationships and becoming part of the dialogue around social policy.
The organisation’s advocacy work includes both individual and systemic advocacy. “We work with individuals who have been discriminated against as a result of their disability. It can be as simple as providing information or maybe providing mediation. We also actively take our policies and try to influence the community, which means we can help a lot more people. We have a client consultation process at local, regional and national level, which we use to help inform the services provided by Vision Australia.
In Australia, a lot of funding is allocated on the basis of involving service users in the process. It can sometimes be hard for clients to be critical, as they may fear that the service will be taken away, so that’s a challenge that we have to deal with, but overall it is working well,” according to Diamond.
Vision Australia recently moved its communications function away from the marketing and fundraising department and into Diamond’s international and stakeholder relations department, a shift which acknowledges the importance of policy-driven communications, rather than a singular focus on fundraising communications. With a staff of around 1,000 people all across Australia, internal communications with staff and service users is also a very important aspect of the organisation’s work.
While funding is always a concern for an organisation like Vision Australia, the country has not faced the same recession as we have seen in Europe and as has been experienced in the US. Although a fall in the value of reserves in 2009 did have an impact on Vision Australia’s income, both in terms of government funding and fundraised income, as Diamond outlines.
“Australia is quite fortunate compared to other countries but we are still cautious. Fundraised income has remained stable, rather than falling but we are conscious that what happened in 2009 could happen again, so we take nothing for granted. Vision Australia receives about 30% funding from the government to deliver programmes and we fundraise the rest. So our income hasn’t increased for the last number of years but the number of service users has.”
Vision Australia is set to face further challenges as the Australian government plans huge changes to the way they fund disability services. The current method is to provide block funding to organisations like Vision Australia, which enables them to provide services to people who are blind or vision impaired.
But under the new system, which is still a few years away, there will be a shift to individualised funding, where individual’s needs are assessed and the money is given to them directly to purchase services from an organisation of their choosing. As is the case in Ireland, Australia’s population is ageing and the majority of Vision Australia’s service users are older, with an average age of 79. “We deal with quite an older population of client, although a lot of our funding does not reflect that. Disability funding goes up to the age of 65 and then people move to age care. This is a real problem for us and it is going to become an even bigger problem under the new funding programme. There is a fundamental assumption that people over retirement age don’t require services, they just need to be looked after but age is irrelevant to what services they need,” explains Diamond.
In 2008, Diamond was elected President of the World Blind Union (WBU), for a term of four years. The WBU is an internationally recognised umbrella organisation, representing about 285 million people who are blind or vision impaired in 190 member countries. The WBU brings together major national and international organisations of blind people and those providing services to them. During Diamond’s term, the WBU developed and is implementing a strategic plan, which focuses on three priority areas:
1. Representation: promoting full participation and equal opportunities for blind and partially sighted persons in all aspects of social, economic, political and cultural life.
2. Capacity building: strengthening the capabilities and capacity of the WBU regional structures and member organisations.
3. Resource sharing: serving as an international information and resource centre on matters in respect of blind and partially sighted persons.
One of the big projects we are working on is the establishment of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) Treaty, which looks at the cross-border sharing of alternate format books. We are slowly making progress but itfs been tricky because copyright law is national law and everyone is afraid to set a precedent. We are hoping to make some real progress at the next meeting in Geneva in November. We also work with the International Council for Education of People with Visual Impairment (ICEVI) on a global campaign to provide education for all children who are blind or vision impaired. The campaign is focused on children in the developing world where currently it is estimated that less than 10% have access to primary education. WBU also works closely with the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (IAPB) on the Vision 2020 Right to Sight initiative, which aims to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020,h says Diamond.
The WBU has been looking at what it, as a global body, can do about improving employment among people who are blind or vision impaired. The barriers that exist are already well known so the organisation has taken a positive approach to addressing underemployment and unemployment by collecting stories from employed people who are blind or vision impaired and their employers, with the aim of changing awareness levels and assumptions regarding the capabilities of individuals who are blind or have low vision. The WBU will then use those stories to campaign for greater employment opportunities in the long term.
Diamond's term as President will end in November 2012, although she will remain involved with the WBU as the immediate past President. For more information visit www.visionaustralia.org.au and www.worldblindunion.org