National Reframing Project
Building scalable models of inclusion that change the way we all think about disability
Disability is all around us
Disability is all around us, and yet we continue to hold people back, through our attitudes and behaviours.
At The Achieve Foundation, we want to build scalable models of inclusion that change the way we all think about disability. It’s about creating sustained attitude change that leads to long-term behaviour change.
The Disability Royal Commission identified social exclusion not as an outcome of disability, but as a systemic issue driven by policy, practice, and community attitudes. It also found that transformational reforms cannot occur without fundamental changes in community attitudes. This responsibility is shared by the entire Australian community.
"You might think excluding people in these ways does not happen anymore or does not matter. But our current social structures make it depressingly common."- Robinson & Karen R. Fisher (UNSW), Analysis of the Disability Royal Commission
Reframing our language
Reframing is a deliberate choice made in what we say and how we say it, including what to emphasise, how to explain, which metaphors and values to use, and even what to leave unsaid, to shape how people understand issues and move them to support change.
We have partnered with the Frameworks Institute, global leaders in Reframing, to understand not just what people think, but why they think it. Central to Frameworks' practice is the principle that emphasising negative attitudes can unintentionally reinforce them. The aim of reframing is to move from a passive "From/To" approach to active, outcomes-focused framing that prevents negative reinforcement.
We are mapping cultural mindsets and public narratives about disability in Australia to find the keys that unlock real attitude change.
•Step 1: Map existing cultural mindsets
•Step 2: Identify the gaps between expert knowledge and public perception
•Step 3: Develop "Reframed" narratives that shift thinking
Testing our frames
The goal of applying reframing to disability in Australia is to shift the cultural mindsets that drive how Australians think, talk, and make decisions about disability. These mindsets are deep, assumed patterns of thinking that shape how we understand the world and how we make decisions.
The Achieve Foundation is partnering with FrameWorks Institute to develop the frames that sit at the foundation of the reframing strategies. The process involves multiple sequential rounds of both qualitative and quantitative research: qualitative methods to surface the cultural mindsets, followed by on-the-screen interviews for rapid qualitative testing, survey experiments for quantitative causal testing of frame effects, and peer discourse and persistence trials to examine how frames spread and function in group conversation.
The result is not a set of messaging tips, but a robust, evidence-based communications framework that identifies which values, metaphors, and narratives are most effective in shifting public understanding and mobilising inclusive attitudes toward people with disability in Australia.
Scaling the project
Changing public attitudes toward disability requires more than awareness campaigns. It requires embedding new ways of thinking at the precise moments where exclusion occurs. The Achieve Foundation works with large organisations across the private, public, and community sectors to identify the moments of exclusion within their systems, for example, in hiring processes, customer communications, service design, or policy.
By implementing reframing strategies at these critical moments, we aim to shift not just individual attitudes but the organisational norms and default behaviours that shape how Australians encounter and think about disability every day. This systems-level approach is how we intend to reach scale: not by changing one mind at a time, but by changing the conditions in which decisions are made.