Lived Experience Applications

I’ve obliquely tweeted on my personal/author account recently of my plans to do something for people with a disability/chronic health condition(s). This could be a whole big thing, but for now I want to get it started in a small and simple way that my spoons can manage.

 

My Plan:

  • To finish creating a course about my lived experience of disability.
  • To sell the course to a variety of corporates.

 

How My Plan Came About:

After being laid off in February 2023, I spent a long time looking for work. And I found that 99% of recruiters knew LESS than nothing about how to deal with a candidate who needed workplace accommodations. I was angry, frustrated, and exhausted.

 

I was also feeling fairly disillusioned about disability organisations, and finding that they weren’t very inclusive of hiring disabled staff. That meant that I didn’t want to direct agencies to some faceless organisation to learn about disability. And I want cash in my pocket. Need, actually. Rent doesn’t pay itself.

 

Then I thought about other disabled people. The amount of people who can do some work, but need to do it on their terms. It’s my dream to be able to hire fellow spoonies one day, but I’m not at that stage of business yet. I realised what I can do right now is provide some kind of referral service. I am also so, so tired of the gatekeeping, the third parties, all this stuff that disabled people have to wade through that abled people can avoid. I am looking at this as an economic justice project; I want more disabled people to earn money directly. 

 

How It Will Work:

I promote lived experience training to corporates. They will get access to a list of trainings when they sign up to my newsletter. They might buy mine, they might buy yours, they might buy none.

 

I am keeping it behind my newsletter for now as it feels like a good balance of keeping details both sharable but hopefully not scrapable-for-spam. I’m sure there are complex set ups that could also work, but this is an easy set up within my energy and existing skills and tech stack.

 

This whole idea could probably be its own project/business/something. Referrals and contracts and training for those who need help to create a presentation for lived experience. But I don’t have the spoons to coordinate any that right now. This small set up, as described above, is all I can manage at the moment on top of my other commitments. I hope to set up a pay what you can course one day to help with creating a course for those who need help doing it. 

 

Other important information:

  • There is no cost to being listed.
  • I do not gatekeep disability. There is no proof required in my world.
  • I am using the term disability to include disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, any other type of human who can offer a non-fully abled perspective to corporates.
  • I do not take a cut of anything they pay you.
  • Your relationship with a corporate is just that, yours. I am not contractually or legally involved in anyway.
  • I cannot and will not be able to offer any guarantee of any kind of income or success.

 

Ready to get started?

Fill in this form.

The questions on the form are below.

The form is hosted via JotForm, who I chose for their field labels over placeholder text. They seemed to be the most accessible and affordable of the form options, but I have not yet fully tested them for accessibility.

 

If the form is inaccessible to you, please email the answers to the questions to vanessa@normalsystems.com. I hope that covers accessibility but please let me know if there is something else, I am learning about accessibility but still quite new to it. 

 

If you like to prepare answers before filling in the form, the fields and example information are:

  • Your name
  • General topic/disability you can share lived experience about (e.g. ME/CFS or legalities of access and inclusion)
  • Type of offering (e.g. pre-recorded training, live Q&A session)
  • Sales blurb/any relevant information about what you can offer (e.g. Vanessa from NormalSystems has a pre-recorded training on introduction to disability at work, with a focus on the lived experience of fatigue)
  • Preferred contact method (How you would like a client to contact you, e.g. email, phone)
  • Contact details (e.g. MyName@Email.Com)
  • Link to a course/booking page, or anything else you’d like a possible client to view

 

Easy Read/TL;DR (which stands for too long; didn’t read)

If you have training of any kind that you want to sell to corporates, submit it using the link above.

Corporate will be able to access the list of providers when they sign up to my email list.

All contracts and finances are between you and the corporate, I am not involved.