Miss Katie Butler

Katie is a disabled community development practitioner, disability inclusion specialist and social researcher. Driven to advance equity, opportunity, and inclusion, she concurrently focuses on improving organisational policy and practice for inclusivity and working directly within diverse communities to build empowerment and community connectedness. Katie is passionate about working collaboratively with others to bring about social change, delivering innovative and meaningful outcomes, and contributing to and measuring progressive social impact.

Katie is a qualitative researcher in fields of disability community and organisational inclusion, social policy, and disability workforce and leadership. Katie is currently undertaking her PhD at the University of Sydney. Applying action research, she is investigating an innovative method to build capability for disability inclusive practice and planning in large organisations, carrying out her fieldwork in a regional local council.  

Katie has worked in the human services sector across local government, not-for-profit and higher education since 2012. She has extensive experience in community development, project development and management, evaluation, adult education, community engagement, advocacy and strategic planning. Katie holds a Bachelor of Social Science, Master of Disability Studies, and full professional membership with Developmental Educators Australia.

As a proud disabled professional and academic, Katie strongly advocates for and works to enable disabled leadership in research, policy development and service design and delivery.  Katie is a member of the Disability Leadership Institute.

Katie holds both professional and academic roles at the University of Newcastle. She works as an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Coordinator. She has oversight of the Disability Confidence Training program, Accessibility Champions Network and is currently Co-chair of the Disability Inclusion Action Plan Subcommittee developing the University’s Disability Inclusion Action Plan. She is also employed as a sessional Academic, teaching courses in the Human Services major of the Bachelor of Social Science.