Local community leads the charge for inclusion
Campbelltown City Council has announced a new partnership in an effort to improve sports accessibility in schools and local clubs.
The Sport4All program, founded by former Paralympian Dylan Alcott, helps community sports clubs and schools facilitate accessible sporting programs.
Campbelltown Mayor Jill Whittaker told InDaily the partnership would allow people with disability to get involved in the sports they want to.
“The sporting community can be such a warm community to find a place in, but for people who haven’t had any experience with particular conditions, it can be quite a challenge,” she said.
“People who haven’t got a disability or that first-hand knowledge find it very hard to imagine what it’s like, or what they would need.
“You know, how do you communicate with somebody who is not particularly verbal, or has sight issues, or has other things that make life just that little bit more difficult in the mainstream?”
You might like
Under the partnership, a person with a disability or other lived experience will be employed by the council and receive training from Sport4All, before working with schools and sporting clubs to identify how their accessibility could be improved.
Campbelltown City Council is the first council in South Australia to partner with the national program, which was founded in 2019.
Whittaker said plenty of local schools and clubs were already putting in an effort around accessibility, but that the partnership would allow them a new approach.
“It comes back to having the skills, to having the experience, and to having the support. And that has, I think, perhaps not been there,” she said.
Stay informed, daily
“Schools have got so much on their plate already, and they try to cater for everybody. But if you are a teacher and you have not a great deal of experience but you want to, say, coach the netball team, you might want some help.
“It will be a trial, obviously, because nobody else has been doing it in South Australia,and possibly we’ll make mistakes along the way – but we always learn from our mistakes.
“We are very pleased to be able to provide this additional inclusion support into our community, to ensure that people with disabilities feel like they are important, that they have a place, and that they are valued.”
Whittaker said accessibility was not a new focus for the council, with an accessibility advisory committee, now the Disability Access and Inclusion Advisory Committee, being established in 2007.
“Over the years we have found that we have been working for inclusion to be just something that we do, and this latest program [Sport4All], is the latest iteration of that,” she said.
[ind_jwplayer playerid=”IAUHEaBa” mediaid=”ocszpqt5″ title=”Sponsored content from The Post.” caption=”Sponsored content from The Post.” sponsoroption=”none” /]
Whittaker, who has been on the council for 21 years, said she was initially driven to join partially due to a lack of accessibility for her late son, who used a wheelchair.
“I looked around and there was nothing for him, which meant there was nothing really for my family apart from the footpath out the front,” she said.
“[Campbelltown] started off with very poor access. We then did an audit of all our buildings, and since we did that audit, we have, I think, transformed the whole council area.
“We have spent a lot of money trying to ensure that inclusion is something you don’t even see. Because if you can see it, it’s not inclusion.
“Access for one is access for all.”
