Climate and Disability Forum: nothing about us without us
The Partnership is excited to introduce the nine local Disabled people who sit on our Climate and Disability Forum, as part of the Community Climate Action Project.
The Forum is a group that meets bimonthly to give guidance to disability and climate work in Bristol. There are three parts to this work:
- Updating the community climate action plan that was created by and for Disabled people in Bristol back in 2021. The group is making sure that the plan is up to date and adding more detail.
- Giving guidance to the other strands of the Climate and Disability programme to make sure that the work is representing the needs and experiences of Disabled people as best as possible.
- Inviting in organisations doing work on climate change and nature in Bristol to give guidance on how this work can be carried out in a way that won’t make new barriers and can instead make positive changes for Disabled people.
The slogan of the disability movement is ‘nothing about us without us’, so the Forum is playing an important part in making sure that the project is representative of Disabled people. Though Emma Geen, our Climate and Disability programme Associate, is a Disabled woman and has a chronic health condition, the needs and lived experiences of Disabled people are very diverse. So it’s hard for one Disabled person to represent the whole community. The Forum offers the wider Community Climate Action Project a wealth of insight that can be built into the work. This is particularly important because there is currently very little work on disability and climate change nationally and worldwide. The Forum is helping to build this knowledge, which the project will be able use in Bristol and feed into national plans.
The Forum is made up of local Disabled people who represent the broad range of experience that makes up the community of Disabled people. It includes people with a wide range of impairments, including mobility, sensory, learning difficulties, mental health and neurodivergence. It also includes people with lived experience of belonging to other disadvantaged groups, such as being working class or a person of colour. Members were chosen to cover this wide range of experience to make sure that the Forum can have a broad understanding of the barriers, needs, experiences and knowledge that are contained with the community of Disabled people. Among the members is also a lot of experience of working in the Disability movement, the arts and research. There is also the opportunity for further connections come out of the project, with two members of the forum already joining the Community Climate Action Project’s leadership panel.
On 15 April a public event connected to the Forum will be held at Redcatch Community Garden. This will be an opportunity for any Disabled person to hear about what the panel has been working on and to feed in their ideas. Keep an eye on our socials and newsletter for more information.
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