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Peter Downs was Manager of the Australian Sports Commission's Disability Sport Unit for 17 years before Managing Play by the Rules. Here, Peter talks about attitudes to inclusion as part of the 7 Pillars of Inclusion project.
It is incredibly important to have a positive attitude towards inclusion. It underpins how inclusion works, but you know, if you ask a group of people, and I’ve done this thousands of times, if you ask a group of people do you have a positive attitude towards inclusion, people with disability or indigenous or people from different cultural backgrounds, towards inclusion into sports and recreation, you can almost guarantee that everybody would say they do.
So why is it then, I ask, why is it that attitudes are often cited as the biggest barrier to inclusion? Well, I think that’s because there’s a big gap between positive intention and actual behavior. People have a good intention to inclusion, but they don’t actually adjust their behavior or recognize or know what to do or how to include someone in their organization. So I think there’s a real big gap between intention and knowing what to do to address inclusion in a practical sense.
At the end of the day, it’s what happens that really matters. It’s okay to have a good intention for inclusion, but it’s really what happens on the ground, what behaviors do actually modify an organization, modify its activities, modify its policy so that it reflects the community that it’s in. That’s what really matters. The good news is, I think, there’s lots of positive ways, lots of easy ways that this can be addressed. This can translate a positive intention into a behavior. You can raise the dialog. You can start a discussion with people in the club at the committee level or the local level or just between players. You can raise the dialog around what needs to be done. Is our club reflecting the community that we’re in? And raising the dialog, raising the discussion, will actually improve, increase the awareness of how that club actually excludes, perhaps, some disadvantaged populations in that community.
It’s a great way to raise that awareness. It’s a great way to improve attitudes. It’s a great way to get some change in behavior. Another way that you could address attitudes is to physically run an event. Target a particular disadvantaged population in the community, and run an even that includes other people in your organization, but includes a particular target population. When people see inclusion working in this way, it can have a real transformative effect upon attitudes.
They see what is possible. They see it physically right in front of them, and this can be really, really powerful. It also helps, you can identify what needs to be done to improve that program, what certain strategies or tactics you might use to target other population groups, how to adapt and modify particular activities. For example, if you’re targeting people with disabilities in a real educative and transformative effect upon attitudes by actually doing something, running an event. After all, that’s what sports are good at. So target disadvantaged groups. Run some events. Evaluate what happened. And that will really have a transformative effect upon attitudes.