Happy birthday Nundah Co-op

28 April 2023

Nundah Co-op has created employment and training opportunities for people with mental illness, psycho-social disability learning difficulties or intellectual disability for the last 25 years. Today Nundah is marking a quarter of a century of disability community inclusion and empowerment and we couldn’t be prouder to be a sponsor of their celebrations.

The Co-op is owned by its workers, which means they not only work for Nundah’s parks and garden maintenance, café and catering businesses, it means they have a stake and voice in the business. Nundah helps people who have difficulties finding employment get a job and keep it and in turn to lead ordinary lives in the community.

“For the majority of our members who were long-term unemployed, they had been in the role of a receiver of services, not ever a participant or a producer. So to move into that space is very empowering for people. Seeing someone before they start work in the co-op, you can see the body language is saying, ‘I’m not valuable, I’m not worthwhile’, and then after they’ve done some shifts in the café or in the parks, they’re walking around and feeling a sense of pride about themselves because they’ve given something back, they’ve contributed, they’ve earned their pay,” (Richard Warner, Coordinator, Nundah Community Enterprises Cooperative).

Today the co-op has a staff of more than 50, 35 of whom have cognitive difficulties, each person matched to quality jobs in a way that meets the needs of the employee and the business.

We join with Richard and the team in celebrating the potential for further growth. Because of the place-based nature of the business, Nundah is looking to ‘horizontal scaling’, where the co-op seeds and supports other social enterprises across Queensland based on the same business model. We look forward to working with Nundah through the Care Together program to action this vision.

Happy birthday Nundah! Vanessa Fabre, thank you for representing RACQ and the BCCM at today’s celebrations.