“We want to unite for inclusive employment, create a safe, creative environment for disabled people* to be paid to co-design solutions, and foster collaboration across local organisations. We want to share our Ways of Working to support everyone to understand how to create fair opportunities, services, and employment in our local communities.”
This is the world Active Inclusion envisions. We are a team of people who are creating a learning and employment peer support community for people with lived experience of barriers to employment. We collaborate with our local service organisations in South London, and outer boroughs, who are committed to creating agency opportunities for individuals facing obstacles to employment, housing, healthcare, and wellbeing for us, local residents.
#NothingAboutUsWithoutUs
To do this we will share our Ways of Working that are based on us all being flexible. We do this by working in a way that fits our lives. We all support each other, because life happens!
We understand if we can’t always participate. No pressure! If we have to move or rearrange things or stop, we have permission in our team to do so. This doesn’t mean we don’t get stuff or tasks done, our website is our evidence of that!
Evenings often work best for some, others early mornings, or different hours on different days.
We all work in so many different ways: solo, with a buddy, or as a team. Or a mixture of all of these. It’s our choice.
We choose the online spaces that suit us all and work together to find a way for us to communicate our work as a team.
We have the choices of taking part online, monthly face to face team meetings or events (when we have capacity).
We have tried many tools and found we all use WhatsApp or Google Workspace, email and virtual chats.
We pop in and out whenever we are free and it’s the right time for us. Our work is intense so flex and empathy here is important.
We believe people are often stopped by things in society, not by their own differences – the social model of disability. Everyone feels and deals with these things differently. We also know that sometimes people think about disability in other ways, like the medical model. Tim shares his own thoughts about this, and what it’s like for him.
On 23rd July 2024, the Active Inclusion team ran an ‘unconference’ called ‘What’s a Happy Workplace?’ hosted in person at Clifford Chance, London.
In 2023 we started the coproduction Pilot: Active Inclusion. Explore more about our journey.
We are excited to share our journey to reveal good practice of What’s a ‘Happy’ Workplace?
We hope you enjoy these spaces as they grow. We will share our work to become a user-led lived-experience community of action.
“We are diverse group of people. We either volunteer our time if we are in paid employment or looking for work. We strive for us to receive payment for our expertise and time if we are looking for work. We apply for funding and create partnership opportunities so we can do what we do.“
A work in progress – April 2026
We are aware that this website, created in WordPress, has accessibility limitations. If you experience any problems, or bugs or would like to advise us on how we can improve this website, please contact us.
We purposely do not use overlays as these create issues for many users. The colours and fonts on this website have been designed to be accessible, but if any accessible technology you have doesn’t work, please do let us know. We are learning all the time – feedback is so important to us.
We are maintaining and developing this website with no funds. We had a little money to start the basic design.
We are on a journey to embed accessibility into our culture of our Ways of Working. We hope to do this on our website. If you would support us in doing this, please get in touch. Technical, content, movement, well any support for our website, is welcomed.
We have audio files, transcribes of videos and images, and add them in to some of the website, if you would like any, or any are missing, we can send them to you.
And we work to be WCAG compliant all the time, and aim to improve every day. We aim to review the website every year, and if we can, every 6 months. We would like to thank Signapse for BSL interpreting our website via a Google Grant. And we could like to thank, Kaye, OIi, Lizzie and Stewart, not only for designing us a colour scheme and our style, but for their mentoring of our team members, and utter most patience in sorting out this WordPress website page for us – you all rock DRUM.
What's a 'Happy' Workplace? 