Rebooting my blog for an unexpected journey

I haven’t written a personal blog in a long time. While I’ve been writing regular blogs since setting up my social enterprise last year, the last time I blogged on this page was when I travelled around South East Asia at the end of 2014.

Even a year ago I had no intention of writing a personal blog again. But then something unexpected happened. I found out about The Churchill Fellowship.

The Churchill Fellowship offers people who are working on social issues in the UK the opportunity to travel overseas to places where they have developed different initiatives to affect that social issue. Fellows learn about the work that is being done and then bring those ideas back, both to develop their own work and also share with other people.

Since setting up my social enterprise, I’ve been trying to find ways to share wheelchair skills. Something that has made a massive difference to my life and that I’ve seen make a massive difference to others’ lives. As important as wheelchair skills are, developing a way to get it out to people has been complex.

Reflecting on my first year since setting up my social enterprise has also made me think about how much lived experience is out there in our communities. All the experience people have that could be developed into valuable support for others in similar situations.

My question is this: how do we mobilise the people with lived experience who have these ideas?

Later this year I’ll be travelling to Australia and New Zealand to find out about their work around innovation and exploring ideas that we can use in the UK to share lived experience more widely.

If you’re interested in staying up to date with what I’m doing as I go on my travels, you can find and follow my social media channels here.