Ultimate Victoria statement on Black Lives Matter
On behalf of the Board of Directors and employees at Ultimate Victoria, we want to reach out to the Ultimate community here in Victoria and around Australia to say we believe that Black Lives Matter, we support the #blacklivesmatter movement and we will stand with every member in our community to address and remove racial prejudice, and to work towards a more inclusive and equitable community and society.
It is, most importantly for us, the time to acknowledge the systemic discrimination, social and health inequalities experienced by First Nations people here in Australia. We would like to express our genuine desire to see change across the justice, community and health systems and reaffirm our commitment to ensuring equality and inclusion in all we do through Ultimate. This includes working in collaboration with our community and sporting partners to address some of the social and health inequalities experienced by Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander Australians.
Ultimate Victoria would like to first mention the Indigenous Ultimate Association – a fantastic organisation encouraging more Aboriginal and Torres-Strait Islander people to play ultimate.
We want to encourage and will be providing resources for all tournaments, UV and club meetings to have an Acknowledgement of Traditional owners.
Here you can find out what an Acknowledgement of Traditional owners is, and why it’s important for us to incorporate awareness and acknowledgement into our sporting culture.
We will begin an Inclusion Action Plan through Sport and Recreation Victoria’s ‘Together More Active’ grants over the next 12 months.
We will also align our strategic aims with Sport Australia’s reconciliation action plan which can be found here.
And we will continue to share resources and educate our community.
~Deadly Questions is a fantastic collation of answers to questions that you might have about Aboriginal culture and racism in Australia.
~And here is an excellent article summarising the issues of racism in Australian sport as it stands within the circumstances of 2020.
Finally here is a personal statement from our President.
We welcome any contributions or feedback on this action plan from members of our community and hope that in taking intentional action in the right direction we can begin to create positive change.
Thank you to Rueben Berg for taking the time to contribute your knowledge to UV.
Please send any questions to board [at] ultimatevictoria.com.au