RENTING WITH CONFIDENCE: Improving the lives of renters living with disability

It’s impossible to underestimate the value of knowing your rights and responsibilities as a renter. With current vacancy rates at unprecedented lows across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, there’s never been a greater need for the Building Tenancy Skills project and its tenant advocacy workshop, Renting with Confidence. 

The overarching aim of Building Tenancy Skills was to learn from renters living with disability — a tenancy cohort at significant risk of forced moves - in order to identify what was needed. Using the experience of tenants, the project co-designed resources to support tenants to understand more about their rights, their responsibilities and the supports available to them in times of stress. The workshop helps ensure one of the most vulnerable groups in society can continue to live safely in their community and improve their social networks and connections.  

This initiative dates back to mid 2021 when Shelter WA’s Donna Turner invited tenants with diverse experiences of disability to come together to design what would eventually become Renting with Confidence — a series of workshops for tenants with disabilities designed to increase their understanding of their rights and responsibilities as renters, how to seek tenancy support and how to speak up when something goes wrong.

The tenant group driving the formulation of the workshop content included Aboriginal people, people who identified as LGBTQI, people from different cultural backgrounds and people with physical, sensory and intellectual disability.

"The data is pretty clear that people with disabilities are more likely to be forced from their rental."

“The data is pretty clear that people with disabilities are more likely to be forced from their rental,” says Donna Turner. “It was also clear there is a lot to be learnt from tenants themselves, about how to turn this around and improve people’s ability to sustain their tenancy. Over the 10 months the tenants were employed in the project, they learned so much more about their rights and responsibilities as tenants, and they also pointed out practical improvements that could be made to systems.”  

As well as learning about crucial tenancy support services, the participants gained important skills such as safe storytelling, how to facilitate meetings, co-design, making videos and translating information into plain English so it can be read and understood by more people.

“The tenants involved in the project felt more confident about their tenancy knowledge and felt able to influence those around them by, for example, sharing the tenancy resources with people in their communities,” adds Donna about the outcomes. 

"Four tenants have gone on to be employed as facilitators for the Renting with Confidence Workshop."

From the original group of 13, four tenants have gone on to be employed as facilitators for the Renting with Confidence Workshop, presenting the workshop to other tenants and playing an important role in extending the positive outcomes to the wider community.  

To date, the workshop has been delivered to more than 130 tenants in metropolitan locations and regional centres around Western Australia. Furthermore, independent evaluation has highlighted that tenants who attended workshops left feeling more confident about their rights and responsibilities. Many also felt more self-assured about communicating with their property manager or tenancy officer. 

When asked what gave tenants the most satisfaction from the program, Donna freely shares direct feedback from the tenants themselves: