Published 23 December 2024
Wow, what a year it’s been! As we look back, it's cool to see how far we’ve come working together as a community. We wanted to break down what we’ve been up to with Firstport in 2024 and share some pretty cool moments.
Through all the changes this year, we’ve seen our disability communities resilience, strength and determination. Really embodying our EGL principals and it’s nothing short of inspiring 🙌.
Now, let’s look back on the amazing achievements we’ve accomplished this year.
Connections across our motu
We’re so proud to have caught up with so many of you this year and are super grateful for all the invitations!
From hearing their stories and solutions from our community at the Autism New Zealand breakfast in Parliament, to reaching new members through Armageddon, to connecting with our rangatahi at the annual Disability Connect Transition Expo - we’ve had such a great time-sharing ideas and working in partnership. We were part of over eight huge events this year —and that’s not even counting the online hui!
On top of that, we’ve shared some awesome things on our events hub:
This year’s Matariki celebrations were unforgettable. With 21 accessible events across Aotearoa, it was fun to see opportunities for people of all abilities to come together and honour the Māori New Year. We’re looking forward to see the number of accessible events grow even more next year!
Inclusive school holiday programmes were a hit in July! After hearing your feedback at the NZDSN conference earlier this year, we shared info about 10 inclusive holiday programmes and it was great to see them be so valued by our community. We discovered that Recreate NZ, Spectrum Care, and other amazing organisations doing fantastic mahi in that space for our community.
And of course, we couldn’t forget about International Day of Disabled People! We had 19 awesome events listed across the motu to celebrate, the most we’ve seen and they really stepped up their game with activities this year too. We had events all the way from Kaitaia to Palmerston North to Christchurch. Ka pai to mahi!
Ready set play 🎮
Our community were thrilled about the launch of our accessible gaming hub! Big thanks to Kylee, Naomi, Lachlan – our awesome testers – and everyone in our community who helped make this happen, including PlayStation New Zealand.
The buzz for this project is still going. And this hub aims to create a space where gamers of all abilities can, share experiences, and enjoy gaming without barriers. It’s a significant step forward in making the gaming world more inclusive. Take a look and let us know what you think.
Staying true to our community
Reflecting the voices and experiences of our community has been our guiding principle. From accessible events to targeted advocacy, we’ve worked hard to ensure that our initiatives align with what matters most to you.
We’ve run a huge project getting careful feedback from our community on the navigation of our website. Our enormous gratitude to the talented people who took part in this, you blew us away with your insights and we can’t wait to get those updates on-site in 2025.
While we’re proud of what we’ve achieved, we’re also aware that there’s more to do—and we’re ready to keep building on this.
The small wins on Firstport
You might have noticed that our website hasn’t had a major makeover, but it’s the small updates that make a big difference!
Thanks to your feedback, we’ve made meaningful changes throughout the year. From updating icons, to shifting content again from "Whaikaha" to "Disability Support Services," our site has slowly but surely evolved, and we hope it’s made finding information easier for you.
We’ve aligned our Wellbeing section with Te Whare Tapa Whā, added more resources about employment, rights, getting support - and we’re always open to your ideas.
If there’s information or advice you think our community needs, let us know—we’ll do our best to track down the right info in the easiest way for you to get to it!
Looking Ahead to 2025
Looking ahead to 2025, the future’s looking bright but busy! We’re going to keep improving our website that support and reflect the needs of our community.
Next year we’ll finish our website platform shift and start our navigation update. You can look forward to everything you’ve said about making things easier to find showing up on Firstport.co.nz.
The journey’s just beginning, and we can’t wait to see what we achieve together next year. As we continue this journey, Firstport will continue to keep circulating information about policy shifts and government changes that impact our community.
A final thank you, merry Christmas and happy new year.