“Making disability information accessible to individuals from Black & Minority Ethnic groups”

June 2009

A one year project funded by the EHRC (Equality & Human Rights Commission).

Next Steps

The overwhelming fact gained from undertaking this project is the amount of BME community development work taking place across the UK, focussing predominantly in the areas of health provision, access to services and infrastructure. Most of the methodology, practices and outcomes from these work projects is not currently written up and therefore, largely unavailable to the majority of organisations in the disability field who are just embarking on developing their services to include BME communities. We hope we have gone some way towards bridging this gap by publicising the work we have done with the four focus groups we have explored. Looking forward, we appreciate that there is a great deal of scope to continue and sustain the relationships we have formed in these areas.

We also recognise that while at the start of the project we published a selection of current national research papers on eleven areas of BME people and disability, only four have been explored and those therefore remaining for future exploration and development are:

Rural communities
Disabled children and their families
Carers
Deaf people
People with a learning disability and their carers
Adults and children with autism
People with mental health difficulties
Health issues within BME communities

It is essential when taking this work forward that the starting point is with the specialist local voluntary organisations to establish what work has and is now being undertaken in this area and to then work in partnership with BME community groups to engage them in supporting new initiatives.

However, in choosing one of the above groups, our recommendation is to concentrate on one town or borough of Surrey and combine it with one ethnic group and one type of disability initially. Those working in the field of disability already appreciate how complex individual needs can be. Add to this a cultural diversity and language issues and you already have a large scale project to hand.

Surrey’s BME Community

Surrey does not have a BME forum at the present time however funding has recently been secured by Surrey Community Action to develop one which will seek to include and welcome as many of the county’s BME community groups as possible and give them a voice. This forum will be an excellent place for service providers to gather feedback on new and existing outreach work and shape their service delivery so that the needs of BME communities feature in core strategic plans. It will also enable disability and other community organisations to promote their services to their communities and reach many people who do not know they exist.

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