What's a 'Happy' Workplace?

Active Inclusion: Equity in Employment

“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.”

A photo of 11 of us at our Unconference in July 2024. Two of us are sat on the floor, and two people are sat in our wheelchairs. Then people are stood behind and around us seated.
A photo of us all at our Unconference: What’s A ‘Happy’ Workplace? in July 2024. Photograph by Tom Ryan-Elliott.
Our logo illustration. A purple circle with three shadow images of three people with their arms raised and celebrating. A light purple circle surrounds them and contains the text: Welcome.

Imagine a world where everyone, regardless of the barriers they face, has the opportunity to thrive.

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

Ways of Working

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!

When

Evenings often work best for some, others early mornings, or different hours on different days.

How

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.

Spaces

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.

Where

We have the choices of taking part online, monthly face to face team meetings or events (when we have capacity).

Tools

We have tried many tools and found we all use WhatsApp or Google Workspace, email and virtual chats.

Our Time

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.

Our story

An illustration showing Active Inclusion's team. There is a a half circle, like a rainbow in the middle bottom of the illustration. In that is our logo, three shadows of people with their arms in the air. And 'Our Team' is in a purple arch over them. The rainbow is surrounded by lots of bubbles with each team member's name in them.

models of disability

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.

Tim sharing his view on models of disabilty.

We are this…

A colourful graphic illustrating the 'We are this' framework, highlighting key principles: Co-producers, Experts, Challenging, and Supportive, related to inclusive employment.
A vibrant graphic showcasing the core values of Active Inclusion: Co-producing, Expertise, Supportiveness, and a Challenging approach towards fair employment.

People often ask us what we are. We made a picture to show what we really are. We are lived experience peer support experts. We offer ‘Learning and Peer employment support’. We want to make it clear that we are not:

  1. Trying to make people on benefits or without jobs be forced to work. We don’t want any service to push people into work if they don’t want to or aren’t ready.
  2. Part of any of the Government’s work programmes.
  3. A job programme.

We are a flexible group, our model might change.

More to come…

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.“

Our Purple style circle logo. Inside the circle, is a shadow illustration of a person sitting on a bed working on a laptop. In a light purple circle surrounding them, the words 'How to...' are enclosed within.

We’ll have lots of free How to…
Guides for you.

Our Purple style circle logo. Inside the circle, is a shadow illustration of a person sitting up in an electric bed working on a laptop. In a light purple circle surrounding them, the words 'Our Community' are enclosed within.

We’ll share our #WaysOfWorking
and our activities.

Our Purple style circle logo. Inside the circle, is a shadow illustration of a person sitting on a bed working on a laptop. In a light purple circle surrounding them, the words 'Our Stories' are enclosed within.

We’ll have lots of blogs, films and animations to share of our work, research, and lots more.

Our website

A work in progress – October 2025

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.

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