- Get link
- Other Apps
Featured post
- Get link
- Other Apps
Intentional Invitations – exploring a mechanism to accelerate social inclusion
Marginalised people are under-represented as community participants. This limits their opportunities to make unique contributions and results in significant loss of human potential.
Developing Best Social Inclusion Practices
Developing Best Social Inclusion Practices
Working with staff from community development
organisations, we will demonstrate the impact of this facilitative approach, and in the
process, will provide their leaders with evidence as to the added value of
‘Thinking Inclusively’. We address invisible participation barriers and aim to show how such barriers recede during authentic interactions as people realise that commonality of interests supersedes differences in abilities.
By Intentional Invitation, we mean a
deliberate process by which we approach a disabled person and explain how we
are genuinely interested in organising an encounter where everybody is welcomed
and diversity is valued. Though at first glance this may seen simplistic, our
experience is that for a disabled person to receive such an explicit invitation
is very rare – against more current invitations to exclusive events, such as
for instance events dedicated to disabled people.
This idea builds on findings from our work
with the ‘Think Differently’ Arts2Gether project. Arts2Gether
demonstrated that experiencing with extending and receiving Intentional Invitations
is a powerful game-changer, that generates unique micro-interactions. The
project explored potential shifts in attitudes and behaviours of people, both
disabled and mainstream, through ‘participatory’ art: people of varied
backgrounds gathered to create these encounters together, which in turn fostered
new experiences of togetherness. Arts2Gether piloted interventions in different
settings, each time with the purpose of magnifying the micro-interactions
taking place where evidence of shift may be traced. Community encounters were
planned to gradually increase in scope so that we could benefit from cumulative
learning in real time and the feedback received from the community leaders and
participants involved. Our results confirmed that the Intentional Invitations
developed specifically for this intervention were successful in engaging
disabled people, and that shifts in integration can occur when different
groups, including marginalized people spend time together. We are in the
process submitting these results for publication in relevant professional literature.
Our approach is inspired by contemporary social inclusion thinking as summarised
in Cobigo’s literature review, emphasising that “for social inclusion to be
successful from the perspective of the person with a disability, it should
result in a sense of belonging … interrelated with notions of community
connectedness, personal inter-dependency and social capital… it cannot be
simply defined and measured by an objective presence in the community” (Cobigo et
al., 2012, p.80).
Whilst in years gone by, disabled people have been specifically excluded from community life, this is not the case anymore as most organisations communicate - and sometimes even boast of inclusive values. However, statements of intent that are not backed up with specific systems or protocols to implement inclusiveness are insufficient.
Organisational leaders seemingly assume that when ‘protective’ mechanisms against exclusiveness are put in place, inclusive outcomes naturally follow. Most organisations with which I have worked do not offer any mechanisms for their staff to specifically include marginalised people: This leaves inclusive matters to the personal interpretation, or lack thereof, of individual frontline staff and often results in latent exclusion.
Our experience over the past decade working with community development confirms observations in the community-building sector that inclusion does not just happen – it needs to be facilitated. As described by a community event organiser: “Last year I organised more than 25 community events attended by over 50,000 people– this involved full time scheduling and logistics and sending notices through our networks. We don’t have any policy to specifically include marginalised people and our reporting does not include such categories either – so this goes un-noticed and un-reported. We do have a Disability Strategy, but I have no idea what it means on the ground”. In fact staff are so busy with logistics and organisation that inclusiveness becomes another task on otherwise crammed days. Even when frontline employees are passionate about participation, they need to invest extra energy towards inclusive outcomes – which may then go un-noticed.
In light of the above, we propose to test an integrative mechanism whereby staff can facilitate inclusion.
Inspiring organisational leaders to adopt Best
Social Inclusion Practices
Once community development staff harness
Social Inclusion mechanisms, or develop their own in the process of this work,
they will experience the strength of the impact and be in the position to
report on inclusive results. Presenting these results to organisations’ leaders
will provide the impetus to implement ‘Intentional Invitations’ – or apply
other inclusive mechanisms developed during the project.
We will combine ‘bottom up’ and ‘top down’
approaches working in two stages - co-creating our intervention with the
collaborating network mentioned below. We first develop a set of tools, protocols,
and templates that are easy and fun and test the effect of different Intentional
Invitations formats based on our previous results. At the second stage of the
project, we build the Best Practice model with a group of leaders who then implement
plans to spread these initial micro-changes throughout their organisations.
Starting by working with early adopters, we
will assist them create local change. We, of course, first agree on the project’s
aims and definition of engagement. We pair managers so that a collaborative
approach helps them overcome organisation-specific hurdles. The work will
consist in analysing their workload, assessing past inclusive outcomes, past
measures of disabled people’s engagement and contribution, or lack thereof,
noting baseline measures of engagement and contribution from people with
disabilities. We will co-design a strategy to embed Intentional Invitations that
is congruent with their organisations and observe/interview implementation.
This work will produce a Proof of Concept
that leaders can recognise as valid. In order to spread initial results, we
will co-design with leaders the Best Practice that they will roll out throughout
their organisations where potential areas for improvement have been identified.
This will also uncover opportunities for these organisations to raise specific
inclusive issues with local government as a group.
The outcome stories will support the vision
of the 2015 Disability Action Plan for all New Zealanders to experience equal
rights of citizenship and two of the Person-directed outcomes:
1. Increase employment and economic
opportunities and
2. Promote access in the community “I feel
welcomed by my community. I feel respected for my views and my contribution is
received on an equal basis with others”.
Stories will demonstrate workplace
principles, as per the responsibility that sits with MSD under the “Increase
the number of disabled people, including long-term unemployed disabled people,
in paid employment and self-employment on an equal basis with others” priority
of the Disability Action Plan.
Who will carry out this work?
The Fast Track Inclusion Trust is an active
member of the Network for Community Hospitality (NCH), whose members include 40
organisations in the Waikato. Inclusion is a core value of the network, and its
members have identified the need to build supportive inclusive mechanisms.
Our strategy is to start working with 2
organisations, and then expand our work with the whole network members. This
two-stage design ensures that leaders first see in place a working proof of
concept and the value of purposely acting on inclusiveness rather than waiting
for localised ‘random acts of inclusiveness’ to simply happen.
Data will be collected by and by the
academics on the Network for Community Hospitality in collaboration with their
community organisation members. In the past decade, we have published in
peer-reviewed journals, the interviewing and storytelling methodology used to
capture such sensitive and specific data. The cultural appropriateness of the
methodology is ensured through participants’ speaking their own voices during
interviews that are edited in collaboration with them. Participants have told
us that they find this method empowering. Informed consent and procedures will
be followed as per academic standards.
Proposed results and evaluation
We choose to first address social inclusion
practices in the workplace. We feel strongly about the media angle that we will
adopt: we do not present disabled people as heroes who have overcome barriers,
rather we focus on the added value of a collaborative approach in which people,
disabled and non-disabled, work side by side to achieve a common result. Stories
will describe disabled people adding value to their communities by being
actively engaged in the workforce. The message embedded in these stories will
be that it is the collaboration between diverse people that produce benefits for
our communities. Our evaluation will present evidence on:
- Change of behaviour/professional practice: Appraising how staff integrate Intentional Invitations
- Participation of disabled people: Comparing the engagement of disabled people before and after receiving Intentional Invitations
- Contributions made by disabled people: Real engagement is judged not by the presence of marginalized people but by the difference they make. For instance member organisations of the Network for Community Hospitality show the added value of disabled people in achieving their organisational goals.
Project in planning.
To be continued…
Annick Janson,
Associate, Centre for Applied Cross-cultural Research, Victoria University of Wellington
Reference: Cobigo, V., Ouellette-Kuntz, H.,
Lysaght, R. and Martin, L. (2012) Shifting our conceptualisation of social
inclusion. Stigma Research and Action, 2(2): 75-84.