I am a research fellow on the IncludeAge Project that aims to work with people with learning disabilities and people who are LGBT+ to codevelop solutions to exclusion in online and community spaces together with community and voluntary sector partner organisations through community based participatory research.

I have recently been appointed as a Director on a voluntary basis with the Survivor Researcher Network cic. This organisation is led by people who identify as survivors and / or service users of mental health and associated services who have an interest in and are active in undertaking research that is led by survivors and people using mental health and associated services.

I am co-delivering Peer Support Worker Training to Peer Support Workers at With-You on behalf of Health Education England (HEE) and undertaking a participatory evaluation of the training in partnership with other people who have lived experience of mental distress and discrimination.

I am working on the ReSPECT Programme supporting the work stream that is using coproduction to engage with Change People, an organisation that is co-led by people with a learning disability, to inform the co-development of training and materials to support people working in primary care in their engagement with people with a learning disability and carers in anticipatory care planning using the ReSPECT Tool.

Disability and Community: Dis/engagement, Dis/enfranchisement, Dis/parity and Dissent (the D4D project) is a research project that will investigate the evolving ways in which we as disabled and non-disabled people express, perform, experience and practice ‘community’. The project is funded by the AHRC, Connected Communities programme.We are a group of disabled and non-disabled academics from a range of disciplines, with disabled artists, writers and performers, and with community partners (including Accentuate, Disability Arts Online, Shape, DaDaFest and Disability Rights UK). The leadership of the project is shared between Bath Spa University and Accentuate, a disabled-led cultural programme.Our work involves and is informed by the knowledge and lived experiences of disabled people. We explore the roles disabled people perform within and between communities (their own and others), investigating the evolving ways in which disabled people express, perform, experience and practice being part of a community.D4D is learning from participating communities with the aim of better understanding the ways in which we, as disabled people, experience community, and the various forces and contexts (e.g. play, education, medicine, new technology, digital media) have shaped and continue to influence the experiences of communities of disabled people. Our hope is to build understanding, generate opportunities for connections, solidarity, resilience and activism, and support an increased sense of agency and empowerment, sharing knowledge and professional development, and creating new spaces for dialogue and action.

I managed to find some work in the Research Pool at Leeds Beckett to sustain me until my thesis writing is finished. Really enjoying the work and the people. I was working on a Food Dudes Project and doing some transcribing of interviews and focus groups and had some involvement in the "Why Is MY Curriculum White" Programme.Lovely to be back in a university working environment and focusing on research again especially as its other people's research and not my own for a change!

Doctorate in Critical Community Psychology using participatory action research, visual methodologies creative arts, such as body-mapping and participatory video production, while working with co-researchers who were members of developing partners' So What's Changed? Evaluation Team. We evaluated the organisation from the perspective of our diverse members in order to find out firstly, what are the outcomes that 'matter most' to people given their lived experience. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was 'tentatively' suggested as a framework for what 'mattered most' to co-researchers. This was 'tentative' given the UDHR's origin in Western neoliberal societies and its adoption of a heteronormative approach.Secondly, we wanted to know whether using body-mapping and participatory video production (PVP) facilitated people in telling the story of their journey in a manner that was accessible to them and fitted with the person, their groups and communities lived experience. What we found was that body-mapping was useful in a broad range of ways including to some extent as a therapeutic tool and also in terms of members being able to document their experience without the need for literacy. PVP however was found to be more useful for group as opposed to individual processes.

Since coming out of the last election, having voted for a candidate and a party I was not sure of, I vowed that if there was no-one standing for the Green Party in my area then I would stand myself, it seems my words have come full circle to meet me again........................the rest is in the hands of the people of Thornaby, Yarm and Stockton South!!

We were a voluntary organisation undertaking research, evaluation and training in equal partnership with people who have experienced social exclusion in all its diverse forms. Sadly we closed in July 2013 but our legacy lives on in the form of the people with whom we worked with and who impacted upon us during this journey many of whom remain friends.The outcomes from developing partners cic, the Grundtvig Programme 'New Knowledge - New Life Quality' and the Partners in Education and Empowerment for Social Inclusion (PEESI) Project we conducted with the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) remain in our memory and impacted positively on the people we worked with, many of whom are now in positions of power working within public and private institutions on their own projects. This is as it should be, onward and upwards!!

the most important thing I did in my time as R & D Manger was to establish the ARISE Project - Accessible Research Involvement for Service Evaluation in partnership with an organisation led by people with mental health experiences and my R & D Assistant at that time Tony Jones, great guy who is also a founding member of developing partners.I also managed the Trusts involvement in a number of Research Streams, ran a Research Meeting at which people presented mainly staff and held a Research Forum with a focus on grassroots research.I also established the systems for Research Governance across the organisation as a whole when this requirement first became necessary as per DoH directives.