In celebration of IDPWD we share three of our favourite diversity and inclusion projects for 2017!
International day of people with disability is not just a day to celebrate the achievements of people with disability, it is also an opportunity to reflect on where we’ve come from and how much further we need to go when it comes to ensuring everyone is fully included in our society.
At Taste, we’re proud to play a small role in helping to advocate for a more inclusive society through filmmaking and storytelling. We do this in partnership with Bus Stop Films, as well as with our many passionate diversity and inclusion clients who want to shift their workplace culture by engaging their employees through storytelling.
We have seen an amazing change over the last two years within our film industry. This year, for the first time ever, government organisation Screen NSW (now Create NSW) developed a paid internship program for people with disability to work at top production companies. Genevieve Clay-Smith, our co-founder and also CEO of Bus Stop, was a key partner and consultant in this initiative. Excitingly, three Bus Stop students were able to benefit from this opportunity, including Joni Campbell who received the chance to gain work experience at Play School!
These are wonderful steps towards a more inclusive world, but there is still so much work to be done. Equal opportunity when it comes to employment, social inclusion when it comes to accessing education and community initiatives and general awareness around the access needs for people with disability are all still issues that are very prevalent in society.
So what are we doing about it?
We will continue to tell stories that help audiences understand the lives of people with disability, and we will continue to work with organisations to help them create inclusive work cultures until we don’t need to anymore.
We have been proud to produce many brilliant inclusive projects this year and in celebration of December 3rd, we want to highlight 3 of our favourite inclusive projects from this year!
Inclusion Makes the World More Vibrant
Uniting
This short, two-minute film was commissioned by Uniting as a means to help celebrate International Day of People with Disability.
Uniting qanted to make a piece of content that could be shared easily online and help people engage with a message on what it means to be inclusive. The film has such heart that Event Cinemas decided to show the film before all of its movies on 3rd December, across 500 screens, in celebration of International Day of People with Disability!
You can also see how we inclusively brought this beautiful film to life
Enabled by Design-athon
Remarkable
Innovative tech organisation, Remarkable, hosted Enabled by Design-athon — a “hackathon” event that seeks to engage corporate employees in design thinking and universal design theories to solve various barriers to inclusion for people with disability, which are caused by disabling environments and attitudes.
To help kick start the conversations and engage the employee audiences, Taste created five one-minute documentaries featuring five different people with various disabilities talking about the most disabling force in their lives. Often the force came from environments and attitudes.
Taking Back the Waves
Surf Life Saving NSW
We were honoured to produce this short documentary about the various initiatives Surf Life Saving NSW has created to help people with disability access the beach. Without these various programs and initiatives, there would be many people in our community unable to access our coastal way of life.
Hosted by veteran advocate, Paul Nunnari (aka the Other Superman), this insightful documentary will be launched next year at Event cinemas - watch this space!
Henry Smith
Henry is one of those rare creative types who can switch from creativity and ideation to logistics and screen business with the elegance of those fancy quick costume change acts. He is also the co-founder of Taste Creative.