Shifting the needle on the disability sector, globally

For many entrepreneurs, the idea for a business stems from a life-changing moment. For Laura O'Reilly OAM, it wasn’t so much one moment as a lived experience. Laura and her brother Jordan have founded a number of organisations with a mission to create change in the disability sector. Their inspiration comes from their brother Shane who lived with cerebral palsy until he passed away at 21. 

 

“Shane needed support with everything; all aspects of his daily life,” says Laura. “But my parents were very much of the view that Shane would be fully included in our family and in society and that he should have every opportunity in life.”

 

When Shane finished school and entered adulthood, however, it became clear that he wouldn’t have the same opportunities as others. “Society had quite a different perspective on the matter. There just weren't opportunities for him to work and to participate socially, move out of home. All the things Jordy and I were planning to do were going to be much harder for him.”

 

While studying law at university in 2011, Laura and Jordan founded Fighting Chance, a not-for-profit that builds social enterprises that create opportunities “so that people with disability can do the things we saw Shane being excluded from, particularly work but also social participation and housing.” 

 

Within Fighting Chance are four social enterprises, including Jigsaw, dedicated to training and transitioning people with moderate disability into mainstream employment, which was first supported by Westpac Foundation in 2016; and Avenue, a day program that supports people of all abilities to complete work tasks, socialise and develop individual skills. Today, Fighting Chance supports 1200 people with disability nationally, has 900 staff and offices in most major cities. 

 

In 2015, Laura and Jordan founded Hireup, an online platform which puts people with disability in control of their support workers. “Before Hireup you'd have to call an agency, and they'd send someone who would do an assessment and then send workers to the family home. But you'd be sitting there at 7 in the morning not knowing if the worker was coming, and if they were going to have a connection with Shane,” says Laura. 

 

“We saw that the quality of Shane's life was directly correlated to the connection to the workers that he really bonded with.” 

 

Hireup uses technology to put people with disability in charge of their support workers. It has made more than 135,000 support connections since 2015 and employs more than 15,000 workers nationally each year. 

 

Laura was awarded a Westpac Social Change Fellowship in 2018, when she was looking to scale Jigsaw’s impact from Sydney. The Fellowship supported studying innovation at Harvard, and impact measurement at the School for Social Entrepreneurs in London. She also visited other employment social enterprises in Europe and put learnings into action with Jigsaw, which now operates in Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Canberra.

 

Last year, as a result of travel to Egypt and meeting a young boy with cerebral palsy very similar to her brother Shane in a dusty street, Laura started to think about taking her work in the disability sector global. As last year’s recipient of the inaugural $10,000 Westpac Scholars Trust Helen Lynch AM Leadership Award, she was able to attend the Skoll World Forum, a global gathering of social entrepreneurs in Oxford, UK in April. As well as the funds to attend, Laura says it was Westpac Scholars Trust’s connections that helped her get there when her initial application was rejected by the organising committee. 

 

Networking on a global stage was an eye opener, she says, and one that expanded her vision for her work. “The thinking behind going to Skoll was that I could start to build networks at the global level, rather than the national level,” she says, adding the experience was unbelievable. 

 

“I think we dream pretty big here but there's a lot more head room there in terms of vision and ambition. In the next couple of years, I'd like to think about how to shift the needle on the lived experience of disability globally.” 

 

Laura knows Shane would have enjoyed being part of the Fighting Chance and Hireup communities. “I hope he would be proud of what we’re doing,” she says. “He didn't really get to see any of it, but he would have loved the tech aspect of Hireup”.

 

Laura is humbled by the impact the organisations are having today. “Collectively, the work of my organisations has reached a scale I could scarcely have imagined back in 2011,” she says. 

 

To date, the organisations have turned over lifetime revenue of $1.3 billion and provided approximately 22 million hours of support. 

 

“Critically, we know from our impact measurement processes that the work we do make the lives of the people we support measurably better, something I am extremely proud of,” says Laura. “And our work brings with it a degree of innovation and creativity that, even a decade after the launch of the NDIS, is still relatively unusual in our sector.

 

"I am grateful to my brother Shane, whose journey as a young man with disability shaped my adult life and allowed me to find a calling and work that I deeply love."

 

Published 1 November 2024