Papers & Presentations
A community organisation changes. Technology: From pain to gain
Glenn Kelly & Dean Dadson
Headway Victoria: Acquired Brain Injury Association Inc.
Community organisations can be slow to assimilate new technology because they face hurdles such as restrictive budgets and cultural barriers by staff. The organisation's focus, it is said, is on clients and not computers.
Headway Victoria is a disability-based community organisation that operates statewide with few staff and limited financial resources. Two years ago it made the courageous decision to change from being a technological dinosaur to being technologically proficient by investing meager resources into a computer system and staff training.
The change was painful: Unfamiliar hardware and software confounded staff. But, slowly, they came to use the technology in ways that benefitted themselves and their clients. For example, resources in our library are now locatable and our library is linked to those of related organisations; clients get referrals and information that is enhanced by access to comprehensive databases.
Headway also recognised the potential for technology to directly assist those people living with acquired brain injury (ABI), their families and carers. Hence, we hosted 'have-a-go' days that gave people with ABI an opportunity to trial computers and the Internet. The success of these days justified further development of client access to the Internet and on-line services.
We obtained a $10,000 Skills.net grant to both train people with ABI to use the Internet, and to train local Internet Service Providers about the particular needs of people with ABI. In this way we can facilitate clients' ongoing use of existing, local Internet resources, and reduce social and geographic isolation through technology.