New Zealand Rehabilitation Association, Inc.

• A mother of a four year old with Down's Syndrome is having problems with a home-based support worker not communicating well with her son - she's not sure how to raise her dissatisfaction without causing offence and risking consequences to her son. She and her Peer Group strategise via online forum about conflict resolution, managing home-based support workers and assertiveness.
• A 17 year old Maori blind woman wants to leave home. She and her peer talk about starting out living away from home - including budgeting, keeping safe, applying for disability support assistance etc. She then networks with another Maori Peer to contact her to discuss making an approach to Housing New Zealand Community Housing and a Maori Housing Trust.
• A new migrant family arrives in Auckland from Cambodia. They see a flyer written in the Khmer language at the airport and call the 0800 number, leaving a message. The Peer Project connects them with a local peer group to discuss how to access disability services for their aging relative.

Many disabled people talk about the difficulty of managing the people with whom they have contact only because of their disability support requirements. Copious resources are put into training and up skilling health and disability professionals, but there is no acknowledgement of the fact that disabled people often act in management roles - from day-to-day management of home-based workers to managing professionals' impact on their lives - nor is there a structured, comprehensive attempt to up skill disabled people in roles that take years to become proficient in.

With the support of the Todd Foundation, Diversityworks Trust has begun a six month project that aims to design a flexible, multi-faceted and sustainable peer-based coaching model to support disabled people, especially young people and whanau/families, to better manage their disability support needs. The project seeks to design a model that gives information, educates and demonstrates techniques for the management of disability support workers, providers and services. We are about to begin testing the model by working with a small number of disabled people, whanau/families and consumer groups in Auckland, in order to prepare an ongoing strategy to promote the model as a leading example of peer support and disability leadership.

We want to use this project to explore and understand some deeper issues facing disabled people and their whanau/families and indeed other socially marginalised groups. These issues are created by overloaded systems of support offered by government and NGOs, whereby individuals and groups are left dependent on services that are struggling to meet growing need. We would like to gain some insight into how people can use community-based peer relationships, virtual communication and other methods to support themselves and each other so that reliance on these struggling systems is reduced. There are belief systems and attitudes that need to be changed in order to refocus and reframe systemic reliance into community interdependence and autonomy. We will explore the nature of these attitudinal changes and techniques to change them.

The social innovation component of this project seeks to create a shift in ideology among people needing disability support from total reliance on "the system" to creative and constructive peer relationships to complement systemic input. We hope to see a reduction in "crisis" situations or feelings of hopelessness when support systems are inadequate and an increase in natural support and solutions.