Ian
I got involved in welfare rights because I needed the money. Not for myself, I hasten to add. During the miner’s strike, a friend and I decided to organise a mobile canteen to picket lines in West Yorkshire. We borrowed an old school bus and gathered together a team of enthusiastic volunteers. We just needed the money to finance the enterprise. Fortunately, Leeds Claimants Union had some and generously offered us a grant. We spent the next few weeks in the bus with soup, tea and baked beans steaming away, travelling down dark lanes very early in the morning.
After the strike ended I felt a bit guilty that I had relieved the Claimants Union of the money, so volunteered to help them provide advice. I was on the dole at the time. To train, I read the Disability Rights Handbook and the CPAG guides; both were much shorter then than now. I was involved in the Claimants Union for several years after that, until our Prime Minister decided that her electorate were crying out for a Poll Tax.
Towards the end of the successful campaign to get rid of the tax, Paul Bradley, a great friend and fellow member of the Woodhouse Campaign against the Poll Tax asked what I would do afterwards. ‘Let me explain: This will all end soon and you have no plans whatsoever’. He suggested that I volunteer at DIAL Bradford, where he worked as a Tribunals Adviser. I explained that I had no experience – and he countered that what I hadn’t picked up at the Claimants Union, he would teach me. And he was a very good teacher. I started out as a volunteer, and ended up working at DIAL Bradford for over a decade, representing hundreds people at Disability Tribunals.
During this time, I noticed that a simple guide to the complex disability benefit system had not been written. So I wrote one: Disability Benefits in a Nutshell, which the DIAL network sent across the UK. When I applied for the job of Disability Rights Handbook editor, I took along the Nutshell guide, in the hope that it was a little more eloquent than my interview technique. It was.
Matthew
While Matthew was working in the web team at the British Museum in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, a fellow team member was a passionate advocate for disability access. Jodi ensured that the team tested the site with Disabled users and accessibility experts, and implemented their recommendations – something that was not common practice at that time. We also added both BSL video and audio description to the site, both innovative for museum websites. Tragically, not long after she left the Museum, and took up a new role at RNIB, Jodi died of cancer, aged just 27. With some other former colleagues, Matthew helped set up the Jodi Awards in her memory, to champion cultural digital projects involving Deaf and Disabled people across the museum and heritage sector.
This influenced his career - his next job was CEO of VocalEyes, an arts organisation that creates audio description for blind and visually impaired people at theatres, museums and heritage sites. He also had a more personal understanding of disability; his two children are both neurodivergent, and one has a learning disability.
In 2023 Matthew left VocalEyes and become a freelance fundraiser. He loves working with and for Disability Rights UK, as it's helped him learn so much more about the Disability Movement, and how Disabled people’s rights and equality can only be secured by Disabled-led organisations, not the disability charities that claim to speak for them.
Róisín
Róisín is not ‘mentally ill’, neurodivergent, or disordered – he is a lunatic! He identifies politically as Mad and a psych survivor – someone who has experienced psychiatric violence. He had been involved in community organising around resisting policing and detention, when he started to join up his own experiences of incarceration as a teenager at the hands of mental health services. It was through this that he learnt the history of the Mental Patients Union, Mental Health Resistance Network, Reclaim Bedlam and East End Loonies, which inspires his own organising and experiences in the psych survivor movement today.
His work in political campaigns and trade unions led him to DR UK, which ended up being an unexpected merging of a life intentionally kept from the workplace now partly informing the day job. He is passionate about building alternative forms of care, survival and support outside the state, as well as having a political understanding of how state-created disablement functions to uphold systems of oppression.