Contribution impact indicator: Invitation to exhibit the creative works
Our approach was guided by contemporary social integration thinking as summarised by Cummins and Lau (2003) and Armstrong (2014) as relative to the groups people want to belong to, the valued roles they can play (Wolfensberger, 1998) or the interests they share with other mainstream people – in this case the art community.
In their interviews, participants have explained how they have felt a sense of belonging through these encounters. As noted by Armstrong (2014), sense of belonging is interrelated with notions of community connectedness and social capital. This research has attempted to surface components of social inclusion in a range of dimensions. We have, however, gone further than interviewing participants to assess their experiences – we have looked for evidence of social inclusion where they may be found. This supports Kendrick and Sullivan’s argument (2010) that a contemporary definition of social inclusion needs to clearly emphasise authentic valued social participation, however arduous it is to appraise. Our community partners proposed, for the work produced by these encounters, to provide the backdrop for a national community gathering (a ‘hui’ in the Maori language), focused on using creativity as a community development channel. Our artists’ works have secured a home and will represent a cause, in a statement that is political as much as personal. In this exhibition, the names of each contributing artist will appear in one list, symbolically bringing each contributor into the hall and sending out a message of ‘on par’ contribution in a concrete way to represent inclusion.
The second contribution impact indicator was that as a result of this intervention, disabled people asked the group to continue working together to co-develop a community garden for residents to contribute to community building. We take both these impact indicators as noteworthy contributors to people feeling a sense of belonging as a result of activities that involve mutual relationships (Hall, 2009).

Mobilisation to change professional practice

Our first learning was about the disabling impact of mobility and transport. One of the poignant obstacles we faced in this work was the role logistics play in enabling community-based activities. We were unconvinced by the argument put forward by some disability support services, who offered no transport to the people they serve because their interventions was to encourage disabled people to independently partake in community life. Whilst we agree that this is a valuable goal in the long-term, we argue that the measure of social participation could not rely on transport independence at too early a stage on people’s path to social independence. At the point where our concern is to help people overcome initial fears and reluctance, this would add an unnecessary obstacle to participation. Indeed no one from this service did travel independently to join in our encounters. Those disability service providers welcomed collaboration with our project, , having organized transport for their clients because they strongly identified with social inclusion goals. They supported the gradual approach, first involving enjoyment of the new situation itself before making claims about the intrinsic value of independently getting to a new activity. Any attempt therefore, to increase social inclusion, must take into account how logistics barriers are to be overcome.
Our second learning is about the need to engage differently with community development staff. Community building staff is so busy with logistics and organisation that inclusiveness can become yet another task during otherwise crammed workloads. Even when frontline employees are passionate about broadening participation, they need to invest extra energy towards inclusive outcomes – which may then go un-noticed and un-reported (Cobigo et al, 2012). Our discussions with community events organizers, uncovered the lack of systems to identify and reach out to marginalized groups, e.g Intentional Invitations. They also have no method to verify that marginalized groups’ integration in changing. The paradox is that staff could use large events’ organising to leverage and impact community integration. At the outset of the project, they had asked for our help in designing ‘Best Practices’ that could be used by their different teams. We interpreted this request as taking ownership over part of the inclusion process with the potential for some change to happen over the participation continuum. On the mainstream side of society, it is about the extent to which community event organisers publicise their events beyond the ‘usual’ channels and the extent to which marginalised groups feel welcome and invited. Elsewhere on the continuum, it is the actions – not words – from the disability sector that need to be scrutinised. The websites of disability service and mental health providers have carefully formulated mission statements that talk about community participation. In reality there are substantial differences in how they implement their vision to create authentic community participation - as opposed to token participation. It is arguable, whether the funding for service providers is efficiently used, if the ball of social inclusion is dropped by not fully enabling participation of target groups, thereby negating much of the good work and effort already in place.

Reflecting about spaces

Label free spaces are temporary intentional spaces, where visibility is for once lowered. Everyone has the potential to be someone with a label, but people are seen for their actions and not their identity markers. Even people that identified with disability labels said that they loved the concept and application of a label free space. Label free spaces solve the problem of wanting to self-identify, whilst also feeling that this separates or stigmatises people.
Some of these interviews changed our own perspectives, because surprisingly, most people with a disability liked and identified with the term disability. This begs the question, whether identification with the word has come from a normalisation of the narrative from the mainstream. Have we, as a society, just projected what we think is right for people with disabilities? It is already a problem because the disability group tended to agree with a lot of the things said - the question ‘what do you think of the word ‘disability’? Do you like it?’ mostly leant an affirmative answer during our collaborative discussions.
“We are always struggling with my brother: should we disclose that has a disability background? He has never identified with the disability community- not in school, and not out of school. Perhaps he sees that there is a clear segregation in society, and that he doesn’t want to be part of that.”(Melissa)
This matched the experiences of others who also didn’t want to be involved with the disability community, in spite of having been assigned a label, for example‘intellectual disability’. When someone transcends the label of intellectual disability, it shows that they have been critical about their identify formation. Are these our leaders in ‘middle spaces’ ?
We were interested in finding out how both parties can start closing the attitude/behaviour gap. It is a movement requiring parties on either side to engage on the bridge and move towards each other. Sam is the father of an artist who once was marginalised: “We must look for solutions that do more than ‘bridge the gap’ but strive to create an overlap so that no one falls behind”. There is however a great ethical responsibility on mainstream society to both initiate and follow up with disabled people. Given that disabled people have less experience of choice and control than their non-disabled counterpart, it would be a valuable contribution for the latter to understand and act on the need to follow up – perhaps more than they would be used to when instigating change in a non-disabled context. Fragile early successes could lead to yet more disappointments and renewed feelings of isolation. In order to avoid setting expectations that may be unmet, action must be purposely taken to build on initial achievements – until new behaviour patterns can set. The process of initiating and following through, however is no different to spreading innovation in service development, it takes place in ‘interactive spaces’ (Nind, 2011) and is certainly a pivotal part of how our changing social services can mesh with our community development services to create more inclusive societies for the benefit of all its citizens.