Happy New Year - DPA celebrates 40th Anniversary this year!

Happy New Year!

We hope you all had a chance to get a break over the summer holiday period. DPA staff are back in the office and looking forward to another busy year. Several submissions are already due soon, it's an election year, and - importantly and excitingly for our organisation - this year we celebrate DPA's 40th Anniversary.

We're looking at how to celebrate the contribution and achievements of DPA members over the years, and will keep you updated with our plans.

One big project at the moment is sorting through the contents over 140 boxes of files, folders, photos, videos and ephemera that we have retrieved from archive storage. Over the year we'll share photos of some of the interesting things that we find and look over the history of DPA that is intertwined with the history of disability rights in New Zealand.

Ka mua, ka muri - in order to move forward we must look back into our past.

[Image Description: Left: A booklet from the First National Disabled Persons Assembly in 1983 was among the treasures found in the DPA archives. Right: Unloaded from their boxes, but still with a lot of sorting to be done, are the contents of over 140 boxes retrieved from archive storage.]