The annual report 2019-2020 takes a bird’s eye look at our work, and focuses on key areas that highlight our impact. As always our main driver has been to enable disabled people and people with lived experience of mental health difficulties to lead ordinary lives. As you will see from reading the annual report, this approach underpins all of our work whether it be our Quality of Life programme, our work with the NHS or our leadership development work with young people.

When we work across England we often meet people who simply think we are too “aspirational” or even naive. They look at us aghast, thinking that an individual is far too disabled or far too complex to live in their own home in an ordinary street. We understand that if people haven’t seen this work before it’s difficult to imagine it being possible, and we also understand that often a variety of factors can come together to make it increasingly difficult for a person to live independently in their own home. However, we also know through our experience what is possible for individuals and it is this drive for an ordinary life that flows through each piece of work. 

In this year’s annual report we have sampled a range of projects which illustrate the different approaches we take. All of these projects are around individual and community need, but they all look very different. They include strategic work such as the coproduction of an autism strategy in Sandwell Metropolitan Borough, facilitating community conversations with 100 people about mental health for the State of Sandwell and facilitating the Challenge board in Wolverhampton made up of disabled young people who are shaping and influencing health and social care policy. We have also included more individual work such as person centred planning, capturing people’s independent lives in Ordinary Life stories, and community connecting with young disabled people in the Common Ground project.

Across all of these examples the team has challenged discrimination and inequality and pushed for greater opportunities for people to be living ordinary lives.