Changing Our Lives is a rights-based organisation, that works alongside disabled people and people experiencing mental health difficulties, of all ages, as equal partners to find solutions to social injustice and health inequality. All of our work is rooted in the belief that no one is too disabled and no one’s mental health is too complex to lead an ‘ordinary life’. Our approach rests firmly on the social model of disability. As such, we believe people’s lives should not be limited or defined by labels and diagnoses and are committed to reframing how society views mental health and disability.
The Changing Our Lives team is made up of talented and experienced practitioners, from an extensive range of fields, who are committed to achieving real change for disabled people and people with lived experience of mental health difficulties. In order to maximise the impact of our work in tackling social injustice and health inequality we recognise that we need to enhance our ability to draw on legal frameworks, in particular, the Human Rights Act, the European Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities and other relevant community care law. We want to do this through our project development work with communities and our person centred planning and advocacy work, in particular by focussing on people who are labelled as having profound and multiple learning disabilities and people with a learning disability and/ or autism who are labelled as having challenging behaviour.
Changing Our Lives is looking for interested experts in the field of community care law and/or human rights law to work with us to identify how we can become better informed as a team and use legal frameworks more successfully in our work. We are open to suggestions as to the format that this pro bono support might take and would welcome hearing from anyone who would be willing to have an exploratory conversation with us to help us shape our thinking in this area.
If you are interested in supporting Changing Our Lives in this way, please contact:
Jackie Taylor, Senior Development Officer
Mobile: 07498 025641