Richmond Wellbeing is committed to ensuring cultural safety for its clients and staff and providing a culturally safe work environment that is physically, psychologically, emotionally and spiritually safe for all.
Richmond Wellbeing provides equitable access and quality services to all, with diversity at the forefront of our support offerings. This includes consideration and accommodation of the unique needs of people from groups such as those with a lived experience of mental distress, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, culturally and linguistically diverse communities, those of different ages and abilities, social class, ethnicity, gender and people who identify as LGBTIQ+.
This understanding and responsiveness to diversity enhances our organisational capacity to better support the development of cultural safety and security across a range of domains. By embracing and acknowledging diversity, Richmond Wellbeing ensures our services and employment opportunities accommodate the needs of all stakeholders. We believe we are richer as a result of our exposure to diverse ways of thinking and being.
Richmond Wellbeing focuses on cultural awareness as a part of every individual interaction. We take responsibility to ensure aspects of unconscious bias or power and privilege do not factor in the ways that we operate. It also means working from a trauma-informed base, striving to create the conditions where microtrauma and microaggression can be named and responded to without fear or favour. This also means responding at every level to support people to reflect on possible reasonable adjustments, to navigate values clashes and being responsive to diverse bereavement needs.
Our approach to diversity and inclusion draws on evidence-based practices and works toward creating spaces and places where people can be proud of what makes them diverse. Inclusiveness for Richmond Wellbeing means paying attention and applying intention to deeply consider our stakeholders and the values that underpin our operations. We believe that every interaction is a cultural interaction and resilience, recovery and well-being are deeply cultural concepts.
Richmond Wellbeing greatly values the experience and knowledge of employees from diverse backgrounds and lived experiences and we recognise that when representatives from these groups participate in service planning and decision making, they make a valuable contribution to guiding our future direction.
Ratified by the Richmond Wellbeing Board, February 2020.
Read our Reconciliation Action Plan (RAP) for 2017-2020.
See Resources for more information for diverse communities.