Online resource reaches out to senior communities

Housing for the Aged Action Group (HAAG) has recently launched separate resource pages for older Australians identifying as Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, Transexual, Intersex and Questioning (LGBTIQ) and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander.

The organisation’s Co-Manager Fiona York says this is the first time they have had specific web pages dedicated to older LGBTIQ and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and hope that it will ensure they are reaching out to older people from all backgrounds and making their service a “welcoming place for everyone”.

“We felt that it was important to have specific pages for different groups to assist people from these communities to navigate to information specifically relevant for them,” Ms York says.

“We conducted research with people from culturally diverse communities on what they thought people needed in order to access information and we applied this to other community pages, such as LGBTIQ and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.”

So far, Ms York says the feedback on the new individual web pages, which have been up for just a few short weeks, has been positive.

“We hope that our service will be seen as a welcoming place for older people from diverse communities, and that we see and increase in LGBTIQ and Aboriginal people accessing the service,” she says.

“We have done extensive work with culturally diverse communities over the last few years that has resulted in an increase of almost 300 percent in older Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) clients and referrals to and from ethno-specific services.

“We’re hoping that this early work with LGBTIQ and Aboriginal communities will eventually result in stronger links and more people from these diverse communities accessing our information and service.”

Ms York adds that while the organisation have no immediate plans to create any more individual pages, they do hope to expand on their existing web pages.