Social Inclusion Conference 2010

Posted by Brenton Caffin on 8 February 2010 | 0 Comments
Tags: social inclusion, Australia, social innovation, education, health, inequality

Social Inclusion Conference, Melbourne Jan 28-29

The national Social Inclusion Board (whose Deputy Chair is our own board member Monsignor David Cappo) recently convened a national conference on social inclusion in Melbourne.

At the conference, the Social Inclusion Board released its latest report, Social Inclusion in Australila: How Australia is Faring, which showed that while we are doing well in many areas, there remain areas of multiple and chronic disadvantage.

Overall the tone of the conference was positive and engaged. There is a strong optimism about what can be achieved combined with a sense of urgency and commitment to make a difference.

Deputy PM Julia Gillard launched the Commonwealth Government’s new social inclusion agenda, A Stronger Fairer Australia, which sets out their framework for action and initiatives already underway.

Keynote speakers were excellent. Sir Michael Marmot talked about the social determinants of health from his experience in the UK and with the World Health Organisation. His message was simple: inequality matters not just at the bottom but across the spectrum and we need to create conditions for people to be able to take control as they are born, grow, live, work and age.

Christine Davies, CEO of the Centre for Excellence and Outcomes in Children Services, talked about the inspiring work they had been doing in the UK to gather evidence of what works and distil it down to digestible quantities for busy professionals to absorb. Their ‘golden threads’ read like a must-do for any effective social policy program – her presentation as well as those of the other keynote speakers is on the Social Inclusion Board’s website.

There were excellent examples of what has been working that emerged in the breakout sessions, however the most vivid – and for our purposes – innovative example was from the final keynote speaker, David Droga of Droga 5. Together with Professor Roland Fryer of Harvard and the New York Department of Education, David’s team conceived of the Million, a mobile phone that was made available to school students that switched off calls and texts and became an education device during the day and reverted to a normal phone at night. Good behaviour and performance was rewarded with airtime and music downloads. The project was piloted in New York and is being taken up elsewhere in the US and abroad.

The quote of the conference came second-hand, but was originally from Social Inclusion Board member Tony Vinson, who said the social inclusion agenda was
“a brief opportunity to institutionalise a good impulse.”