“We unite for inclusive employment, create a safe, creative environment for disabled people*, foster collaboration across local organisations, and want to be paid to co-design solutions. We share our #WaysOfWorking to support everyone in understanding how to create fair opportunities, services, and employment in our local communities.”
*We have collectively agreed to use the term Disabled People.
This is the Active Inclusion vision. We are a team creating a learning and employment peer-supporting community for people with lived experience of barriers to employment. As local residents, we collaborate with our 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.
#NothingAboutUsWithoutUs
We share our #WaysOfWorking based on flexibility, working in a way that fits our lives. We all support each other, because life happens.
We understand that we can’t always participate. No pressure. If we have to rearrange things or stop, we have permission within our team to do so. This doesn’t mean we don’t get stuff done, our website is evidence of that.
Karen Blake MBE, Co-founder, sharing her story of why we are disruptors.
Evenings 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 all and work together on a way to communicate in our team work.
We have the choice 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 barriers created by society, not by their own differences – the social model of disability. Everyone feels and deals with these things differently. We know that people can 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 co-production pilot: Active Inclusion: Equity in Employment. Explore more of our journey.
We are excited to share our journey revealing 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 volunteer our time if we are in paid employment or looking for work, but strive to receive payment for our expertise and time. We apply for funding and create partnership opportunities so we can do what we do.“
A work in progress – April 2026
We are maintaining and developing this website with no funds. We had a little money to start the basic design.
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 improvements to this website, please contact us.
We purposely try to 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 with it , please do let us know. We are learning all the time – feedback is so important to us.
We are on a journey to embed accessibility into the culture of our #WaysOfWorking. We hope to do this on our website. If you can support us in doing this, please get in touch. Technical, content, movement, well any support for our website, is welcomed.
And we work to be WCAG compliant all the time, and 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 would 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 utmost patience in sorting out this WordPress website page for us – you all rock DRUM!
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