Overview
About the Social Justice Unit
The Social Justice Unit drives UnitingCare Children, Young People and Families’ commitment to social justice for vulnerable children, young people and families. It achieves this by building evidence through social research, policy review and analysis, systemic advocacy and influencing decision makers to bring about change in social policy settings.
The Social Justice Unit leads the organisation’s Strategic Direction: Influence public policy and practice to narrow the gap of disadvantage. This work builds on UnitingCare Children, Young People and Families’ strong service delivery reputation by using evidence from and responding to trends identified by programs in order to make positive change for children, young people and families.
First established by UnitingCare Burnside in 1993, the Social Justice Unit builds on Burnside’s long history and commitments to making a positive difference for vulnerable children and young people.
Our social justice advocacy brings together policy advice, research evidence and the direct experience of our programs and service users. We use this advice to show decision makers how policy decisions impact on vulnerable children and young people and highlight adverse, unintended consequences of social policy decisions.
Our research agenda is independent and collaborative, identifying interventions that ‘make a difference’ and building an evidence base to inform and improve service delivery and innovative service models.
We support service quality through our research and program development work, initiatives such as the Outcomes Framework and providing advice on operational policy.
