This month (20 Nov – 20 Dec) is UK Disability History Month, a month which focuses on promoting an understanding of disability issues and the history of disabled people's struggle for equality and human rights.
History of Disability Activism in Manchester
In 2020, the Greater Manchester Coalition of Disabled People produced a series of short films showcasing examples of disability activism, protest, and celebration in Greater Manchester in the 80’s, 90’s and 00’s. The series, called From Manchester and Beyond. The full playlist is available HERE.
What are we doing at Action Together?
At Action Together, our purpose is to enable positive social change and promote social justice. We know that without disabled employees, we would be a less effective organization, and we also know that disabled community members make our communities stronger. We have therefore continued working towards being an inclusive organisation which champions disability rights whenever possible. Here are just some of our actions over the past year:
We developed internal inclusive language guidance.
This includes talking about disability, neurodiversity, and learning disability, and encourages taking the lead from disabled and neurodivergent people on how they prefer to be described.
We created a new Equality Impact Assessment document to be used to ensure our ways of working don’t create access barriers.
Our staff will use this document to prevent indirect discrimination and to ensure accessibility is built into new ways of working from the outset.
We supported organisations in our localities and beyond to begin their journey to becoming Disability Confident.
Disability Confident is a government scheme which aims to support employers in making their workplaces supportive environments for disabled employees. As a Disability Confident Leader organisation, we are able to provide guidance and evidence verification to organisations working towards the accreditation.
We collected and monitored data on our employee demographics and role applicants to ensure we are representative of the communities we work in.
We currently have greater representation of disabled employees at Action Together than the third sector nationally, and disabled employees are equally represented in roles at coordinator level or above as in non-manager roles. However, the employment rate in the UK for disabled people remains significantly lower compared to non-disabled people, so we know we still have work to do both at Action Together and in the sector as a whole.
We created inclusive recruitment guidance to support our members in making their own recruitment processes more inclusive and accessible.
This document is available on our members area, and members can get in touch with their Community Development Worker for additional support.
We continued to ask for feedback from all unsuccessful candidates in order to constantly refine and improve our recruitment processes.
This includes asking about the accessibility of the venue, the interview questions, and any tasks involved in the recruitment process.
We provided Disability Awareness training for all staff.
This was delivered by Disability Rights UK and helped our employees to understand more about the social model of disability and how to remove barriers for our disabled colleagues, members, and service users.
How can you work towards being an inclusive organisation for disabled employees?
Visit the website for more information about becoming Disability Confident.
If you are a non-profit which provides services for disabled people, you can apply for VODG membership.
If you are one of our member organisations, you can work towards achieving our Quality in Action Award.
For guidance on good employment practices, read the GM Good Employment Disability Guide for Employers.
- Access our Inclusive Recruitment Guidance via the Member Resources.
- Click here to view - Inclusive Recruitment Toolkit | Action Together
- Remember to log in to the Action Together website to access this resource. If you don’t have a login for this site, please contact info@actiontogether.org.uk and we can arrange for one to be set up for you.
- Only Action Together members can log in to the website. If you are not a member, but would like to start your free membership to access our resources, click HERE.Get in touch with Disability Rights UK to organise training for you and your team.