Why We Do What We Do
‘In order to reach the high levels of co-production the Active Inclusion project aspires to, it is key to create safe spaces for people to share their views, perspectives and experiences. This is how together we can activate truly inclusive and equitable environments to learn and improve things together.’
Amanda Cummins, SW London St. Georges, Mental Health NHS Trust
We want everyone to have a fair chance at work. We work together, share ideas and listen to people’s real stories. We believe this makes life better for everyone.
Our Vision
To create a sustainable peer support system that enables individuals to thrive in meaningful work while enriching workplaces and communities.
Our Drivers
These principles drive our work:
- Belonging and safety – reducing harm.
- Peer support – community agency developing a choice of support that is needed outside of systems and processes.
- Resilience – disabled people are resilient by nature, so we can support you to understand how flexibility and being adaptive equals equity. We can support employers to become resilient and fill the ‘vacancies’.
- New models of Ways Of Working – there is a revolution in work, we can show you how to be part of the evolution.
- Civic interaction – decreasing loneliness and strengthening our peer support and brokering community action (workers, residents, peers and allies across the UK).
- Advocating our community need evidenced by our direct action.
- Evidence – for long-term change, not short-term.
- Adding value – providing support for people currently falling through the services.
- Quality assurance – informed and driven by lived experience-need.
- Education – resources & events to create attitudinal change.
- Cost saving – local and national – pay the community, work ‘with’ us to invest in our community not ‘for’ us – we are not ‘hard to reach’, we are here, ready and waiting. We are the community.
- Increasing job opportunities – ‘happy’ workplaces.
- Efficiency – self-led lived experience services.
- Climate impact – utilising local group and community spaces.
Our Mission
To support others learning how to embed person and capacity-centred approaches, to grow equitable opportunities and a positive workplace environment. We achieve this by sharing our lived experience expertise and our professional skills by co-producing bespoke activities.
Our work demonstrates that person and capacity-centred WaysOfWorking are effective, particularly for disabled individuals.
Our Aim
We aim to create a safe (as we possibly can, we are aware nowhere is totally safe), creative environment where disabled people are paid to co-design solutions and foster collaboration across local organisations. We are building co-creation and a peer-led community group and a living archive: Stories Of Work to champion the employment narratives of disabled people.
How Do We Do it?
We are building a group of people who help each other. We share what we know and always try to get better. We want everyone to feel welcome and included. We focus on making things happen and making a difference. We want to create new WaysOfWorking, make sure everyone can join in, and support people to have control of how and when they participate in meaningful work.
Our illustration shows how we will do this over the next 10 years:
Agency
We are a collective community on the ground. We support each other to navigate our work journeys: looking for work, getting out of underemployment, staying in work.
Employment Archive
Our website is a living archive of people’s journey’s in employment. Everyone can learn from them.
Ways Of Working
We will share the good, the bad, and the not so good of our WaysOfWorking. We will share ‘how to… ‘ guides and stories.
Challenging conversations
We are not afraid to challenge each other in our #WaysOfWorking. We aim to create a safe and confidential space to do this.
Building capacity
We work to support person-centred #WaysOfWorking. We support people to understand how to break down barriers and self-advocate for the values of our #WaysOfWorking.
What Do We Want To Achieve?
We want to make our local community a better place. We want people to grow and be in control of their life, work, health, and finances. We want our local economy to be stronger. We want different groups to work together to support everyone in the community. We know we are doing well when we see these changes.
We promise to make our work a place where people experiencing barriers to employment (looking for work, volunteering) can take time out of the pressure of the world and be in a place with others to create positive solutions and projects.
#WaysOfWorking #StoriesOfWork
We will always work together, create things together, and keep learning. This is who we are and what we believe in. We want a better future for everyone.
We will add more things to this page over time. We will share helpful articles that tell you ‘how to…’ do things. We will also share how we work together, what we have learned from our projects, and new ideas.
We start by sharing some of our materials on Our Activities page. All shared under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC-ND.
All illustrations on this page are created by Canva AI Design Tools & Templates April 2026. The logos are created by DRUM and Anya Turko.
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