Integrating People With Disabilities Into Communities

Via Cultural Interactions

Matt Edmonds` Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship Report

September – November 2012

“Communities That Work”

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Contents

Introduction - p. 4 Destination Choices - p. 5 Aims Of The Trip - p. 5 New York - p. 6 - The Museum Of Modern Art - p. 6 - Create Ability (at MOMA) - p. 8 - The Metropolitan Museum - p. 8 - The Guggenheim - p. 10 - The New York Federation Of The Arts - p. 11 - Tribes (off Broadway) - p. 12 - Alliance For Inclusion In The Arts - p. 12 - Theatre Breaking Through Barriers (Ike Shamberlin) - p. 14 - Joseph Straus (Professor of Music, CUNY) - p. 15 - Music and Memory (Dan Cohen) - p. 17 - Infinity Dance (Kitty Lunn) - p. 18 - Reelabilities Film Festival - p. 20 Toronto - p. 22 - The Abilities Arts Festival - p. 22 - A Queen Street Cartography - p. 22 - The Listening Post - p. 23 - Toronto At Street Level - p. 23 - Rina Fraticelli - p. 24 - Dramaworks - p. 25 - Famous People Players - p. 26 - The Center of Independent Living Toronto - p. 27 - Audrey King - p. 38 - The Open Gallery at OCAD University - p. 30 - Inclusive Design and Research Center - p. 33 - Kerry Segal - p. 34 - Keys To The Studio - p. 35 - Picasso Pro - p. 36 - The Deaf Culture Center - p. 38 - Museum of disABILITY - p. 40 Seattle - p. 41 - Parks and Recreation Department (Yoga Class) - p. 41 - Vision Loss Connections (Patt Copeland) - p. 42 - Center of Human Developmental Disability at University of Washington - p. 44 - L`Arche Seattle - p. 45

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- Art With Heart - p. 46 - Provail - p. 47 - Jack Straw Productions - p. 48 - The Seattle Center (Pete Rush) - p. 49 - Experience Music Project (Jonathan Cunningham) - p. 50 - DO-IT - p. 52 O`ahu - p. 54 - Hawaii State Art Museum - p. 54 - Very Special Arts - p. 55 - Steven Brown - p. 57 - Landry Fukunaga - p. 58 Conclusions and Recommendations - p. 60 A Postscript - p. 67

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Introduction In the six years I have been writing about disability the statistic that most surprised me came from a 2010 survey by the charity Scope. The report stated that an astonishing nine out of ten British people have never invited a disabled person into their home. That's 90 % of the British population who have never had a cup of tea with someone who identifies with a disability. The same report found that just two out of ten British people who identify with a disability have non-disabled friends. This lack of integration has been hugely damaging. According to social theorists, opportunities for people from different communities to meet and enjoy each other's company have diminished in the last twenty years. It's what the Sociologist Robert Putnam labelled a lack of opportunities to build 'bridging capital' (Bowling Alone, 1995), a beneficial networking of people from different backgrounds. While the last few decades have seen the disability community redress civil rights injustices and the misplaced actions of the majority community, there has been little space for these two communities to meet, get to know each other and pursue shared interests, chiefly because of a lack of accessible forums of common ground. For Katherine Quarmby, in Scapegoat (2011), this lack of a non-patronising meeting point goes someway to accounting for a rise in disability hate-crime. Whether you agree or not with the specific thesis, it's hard to object to the general idea that a society that wants to welcome diverse people is weakened if it doesn't embrace shared experiences. Breaking down social-hierarchies, addressing prejudices and configuring diverse identities doesn't come through reading books. It happens through meeting diverse people, spending time in their company and learning about who they are. So where to begin? How do you 'do' integration? Are people actually interested? I, like many others, have long thought that art and culture might provide an interesting opportunity for people from diverse backgrounds to engage with each other's work, as well as each other. In the world of artistic practice, difference is vital and exciting, new interpretations and perspectives are conducive to new work. The British project Magic Me brings together people engaged in art from different generations to learn together, and more importantly from each other. But there are few projects like this providing the requisite access for people with and without disabilities to engage with or create art in the same space. North America is much more developed in this thinking than we are, promoting art as a tool for access for minority communities across various institutions, festivals and projects. Further, many in the States have begun to heed Putnam's warning and are creating spaces which foster the kind of 'bridging capital' that the sociologist so adamantly warned was being lost. I left for four cities across America and Canada to research best practice in September 2012. It was an interesting time to leave. London was still basking in the glow of the Paralympics, while many with disabilities were waking up to a new dawn of slashed benefits and lost opportunities. This is a report of a phenomenal 6 weeks I spent visiting New York, Toronto, Seattle and Hawaii on behalf of The Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship. It was a journey on which I met a vast array of inspirational people and projects and learned a great deal about the

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world, disability, integration and of course myself. I am hugely grateful to the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust for facilitating my research. Destination Choices To research best practice in the field of art, disability and integration I wanted to push the goal-posts as wide as possible. Rather than drilling down into my specific area of expertise, namely developmental and intellectual disability, I wanted to learn lessons widely, and visit projects working with individuals from the disability community, the Deaf community and those with mental health issues. It is a strategy that benefitted me greatly, allowing me to think about cross-pollinating practices from one area to another. Of course even in six weeks I couldn't visit everywhere and everything I wanted, so I connected with a number of colleagues and writers to create an itinerary that was both diverse and manageable. Each of the cities I chose to visit had a centre-fugal point of interest for my work. In New York I wanted to get a read on how three great art institutions, the MOMA, Metropolitan and Guggenheim, understood themselves as places of social integration. I also wanted to visit the Museum of disAbility (sic.) in Buffalo, New York (the only bricks and mortar museum of disability in the world). I planned to arrive in Toronto on the eve of Nuit Blanche, an all night festival of art which marked the opening of the Abilities Arts Festival, a festal of Art curated by artists with disabilities at the newly opened 'Open Forum'. From here I would travel to Seattle to visit and lecture at The University of Washington's Disability Studies department and attend the headquarters of the hugely successful DO-IT program, renowned worldwide for its scholars program. Finally I would head to O'ahu to meet with Steve Brown, one of the denizens of Disability Culture and Professor of the pioneering Institute on Disability Culture at the University of Hawaii. From these central pillars of interest, I started researching and connecting with fascinating projects in these cities, old and new, that were germane to my project. They led to some incredible meetings and I am so thankful to everyone who took the time to talk to me about their work. Aims Of The Trip To develop knowledge of how various organisations curate arts provision for individuals of different backgrounds and needs. To create networks with North American examples of best practice to help spread their ideas across the U.K and establish valuable relationships. To meet and talk to artists from different backgrounds who benefit from spaces or groups designed specifically with their involvement in mind. To engage with the wider context of disability independence and community integration by meeting with specialists in those areas. To discover structural obstacles of access that I was unfamiliar with so as to increase my own awareness of disability inclusion and further become an ally of the Deaf and disability communities.

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To explore the practical and ideological difficulties of setting up a project that inculcates the findings of the trip. To expand my cultural horizons, make new friends and promote the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust internationally. New York A large part of my intention to visit New York was to engage with three of the biggest art institutions in America so as to learn from their engagements with the disability community. Museums offer the potential for an invigorating and fully inclusive social space, where people from all backgrounds are encouraged to come together as equal participants in an artistic or educational experience. It's an insight which benefits greatly from exposition by a new online group called The Incluseum (theincluseum.com) whose specific focus on the museum as an inclusive space has brought several issues to the fore, and it's one I was keen to investigate. My first meeting in New York was with Francesca Rosenberg, the Director of Community, Access and School Programs at The Museum of Modern Art. She presides over a great raft of art programs directed at specific groups who may have traditionally found the museum inaccessible or not for them. The museum has been forward thinking since 1972 when it initiated a touch tour for people with visual impairments. More recently it has added audio-visual description tours, hearing loops throughout the building, sign language interpretation on request and large-print brochures. Francesca has continued the emphasis on these facilities, whilst increasing their scope and adding more programs besides. Part of Francesca's mantra is that access programs can be unique and exciting opportunities for a specific group. They become VIP opportunities. During MOMA'S touch tours for instance, the usual museum mantra of DON'T TOUCH is completely reversed.

"We're telling people do touch!" And the scope of what individuals can touch has increased �6

no end due to Francesca's lobbying, as well as the Museum curators' acceptance of the importance of access. It's a point Francesca is keen to expand on. "Access needs to stem through the company - it's everyone's job." To that end, both structural issues and staff attitudes must continually be reviewed to create a space in which people can truly feel at home. This insistence on full-access training for all frontline staff is a key recommendation for British practice in the area. From personal experience, if the museum sector is to offer services for all, it must continue to enable the independent visitor, as well as offering access programs for particular groups. Also key, says Francesca, to the continuing success of MOMA'S specific programs, is the vitality of a clear remit. Both in terms of providing a service to suit a particular need or audience, and also in terms of providing what you promised. "The danger of not sticking to what you advertised is that people can be confounded by something they don't know and don't like." The Meet Me At Moma program, which began in 2006, is a clear corollary of her viewpoint. Meet Me At Moma was created for individuals with dementia and their caregivers with the aim being to enhance their quality of life through mental stimulation, communication and social engagement. Trained guides take groups of individuals around a handful of thematically linked art works. Open ended conversations about the art work serve to inspire creative discussion and also occasional reminiscence about an individual's life or family. The program, says Francesca, was created as a response to a particular need. "Learning more about Alzheimer's and the staggering numbers that have it, it seemed like a population we should be putting more attention too." It's this sense of outreach, of looking for new audiences at MOMA, that's very inspiring. The program is attended by young and old alike - both those who have early on-set dementia, and those for whom the condition is more developed. This sense of community is vital. People make social connections and want to come back to be with each other. At the same time, I wondered whether the group minded being placed together under the project's banner in the first place. Francesca answered that logistically it can be a problem, but not necessarily philosophically. Different people have various needs, and knowing those needs through knowing the individuals who turn up is key. Individual attention can then be given to each participant. What interested me from the point of view of art in the museum space as a potential tool of integration is that the project gets great feedback from participants' care givers as well as the participants themselves. Though they were not originally the primary audience of the scheme, the feedback is that both care giver and participant feel a strengthening of their bond, nurtured through joint activity. For Francesca this is a levelling experience; Meet Me At MOMA is about being in the moment, sharing thoughts and ideas and making connections. It's not about Alzheimer's. That's not really in the room. Though memories may be stirred through looking at work, therapeutically it's the communicative power of art in the moment which is at the heart of the project. Having said that, this strengthened bond is between individuals who are already familiar. Further, the access programs at MOMA seem to have succeeded by being designed for the interests and needs of a specifically targeted group. While Francesca is sure not to group individuals in ways they find patronising or prejudicial, the programs do create communities over the combination of both shared experience as well as shared passion. The Art Insight program - an evening-time project which provides audio-description for individuals who are visually impaired and their partners - follows this model. So too does Create Ability, an art-making and viewing program for people with developmental

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disabilities and their families. Indeed this program is even split into two sessions, one for adults and one for children, so as to not pitch its activities at the wrong audience. MOMA have run a successful inter-generational activity session, which would suggest - as Magic and Me back in England - that age boundaries are not necessarily obstacles to shared engagement in arts. The broader question is whether this kind of engagement could work in a disability context. Or whether it would diminish the experience of people whose common experience is subjugation by people without disabilities. Francesca invited me to participate in MOMA'S monthly Create Ability program the next day. The program was created to enable a fun, informative space for adults with learning difficulties and a relative or carer to come and meet and learn about art. Once a month, the group gets a chance to look at a particular artist, learn about a handful of their key works and try an art-making exercise to enable them to think more about the artist's process. It was a hugely fun experience. There were around 20 of us when I visited. We were split into two groups so that an art-educator could take us through the busy galleries to look at key works of the artist Boughetti (who was being featured by the Museum at that time). The skill of our educator Sally meant that the tone was informative but not patronising and engaging but not stuffy. As well as learning about the art, we got to have our input on which pieces we liked, and how we might have expressed the artist's thoughts differently. What struck me on initial reflection was the keen sense of community that accompanied the program - most individuals had been several times before, were already friends and greeted the three of us newbies warmly. Also, that it was fundamentally manageable. We each had our own chair and the session was not over-long. The director of the program, Kirsten Schroeder, puts its success down to a certain fluidity. She was not keen to follow set rules on how people with Autism are supposed to behave in a certain environment, for instance, but rather to engage with individuals' own responses and the knowledge of those people who accompanied them regularly. It's a balance, she added, because you also want people to experiment and engage beyond the boundaries of their loved ones. What I will take away at a more general level is the vitality of a project being shaped by its members, and not insisting on shaping them. A fluidity fed from knowing the participants of the project, their wants and needs. Also, that the same program of art and art making can be engaging for both people with and without developmental difficulties. All of our group learnt something in the session without feeling patronised or left out and further were enriched by the diversity of each other's perspectives and personalities. The question that still lingers is whether opening up a project like Create Ability to the greater public would dilute its ability to offer a unique service to individuals with developmental disabilities, and whether its limited numbers is a key to its success. According to Rebecca McGiness, Access Coordinator at the Metropolitan Museum, trying to do too much with a program can lead to over-complexity and confusion. I met Rebecca in her office after getting enjoyably lost for around 20 minutes. Like Francesca, she has presided over great work, providing engaging and multi-faceted programs for different communities as well as initiatives on how best to create the museum as an accessible space for the individual.

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Rebecca told me that the idea of making a truly inclusive program work well is something she has discussed a lot with museum colleagues, but it's difficult to do without being patronising. For instance, we discuss a Canadian Museum's initiative to create an inclusive program, specifically advertised for people with and without disabilities. Those who came from the non-disability community, Rebecca says, had misplaced attitudes. As so often, that attitude was that people from the disability community must need to be helped; they were coming as misplaced charity workers. It's a clear point of concern. In addressing the gap between people with and without disabilities, how do you make sure that people coming together bring the right attitudes and the willingness to break down the hierarchies that traditionally exist within society. I asked Rebecca if she thought that a shared interest and appreciation of the arts could open up these issues. She answered that on the one hand, making programs as accessible as possible had worked. One program that has been successful in that regard is Drop in and Sketch, a program primarily aimed at teens. A number of teen artists with learning difficulties attend the program and enjoy participating in an accessible and friendly atmosphere. However, Rebecca was also clear to say that she wasn't keen on the notion of Universal Design in learning. General programs for all, rather than groups designed for diverse learning interests and needs, would not be inclusive. The Metropolitan Museum runs a huge range of programs for individuals with specific disabilities. From one to one verbal imaging tours for individuals with visual impairment to large group program such as Met Escapes, which is designed individuals with dementia and their care workers. The key, says Rebecca, is flexibility. "You can have an idea in your head, but you might need to throw it out the window". Reacting to the individuals who attend is the only way to build an accessible and enjoyable program. Access is also about creating the museum as a space for each individual. For instance, Rebecca has worked with Autism Friendly Spaces, a group who advise on how to make public spaces more accessible for individuals with autism. This has led to the introduction of a bag of supports that individuals can carry around with fidgets and ear plugs inside. There's also a new online resource for parents to prepare, identifying quiet spots in the museum, for instance, so that people can have a break. Rebecca was keen to insist this was not therapy, a term she shies away from. Her programs are about museum education. Her art educators are not therapists. And if some of what the programs do might broadly result in therapeutic advantages, in terms of social or cognitive stimulation say, her work has nothing to do with diagnosis. It's about the art in front of the individual, and an individual's enablement to access that art. Rebecca's enlightened support for different modalities of learning made me wonder whether integration of diverse individuals through artistic opportunity might be a complex achievement when a primary focus is on artistic education (rather than say pure self-expression). One of the Met's programs - Met Discoveries - shows that this might not necessarily be the case. For Met Discoveries is in many ways a contained model of people with and without disabilities coming together to learn about art. It's a program designed for families. More specifically, families in which one or more members has a learning or developmental disability. The program has been running for 25 years, so is clearly a success. It was created because of feedback that there was little artistic activity designed for families where a child had a learning difficulty, rather than for just that individual with learning

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difficulties who then had the option of bringing his family along. What this means is that at Discoveries, activities have to have the flexibility to be engaging for all members of the family. Two or three educators take a group of around 25 participants through a thematic introduction in a classroom, then into the galleries where people are encouraged to express themselves in different modalities - sketching, movement etc - before heading back to the education centre for an art making project. It's a good model. According to Rebecca, the feedback is quite clear that families like this opportunity to engage as a family in the same past-time, one that in essence is pitched at all of them. So could integration through artistic education be possible in a flexible atmosphere? Perhaps, but Rebecca also added that families find the atmosphere warm and engaging because they are around others who have a similar family set-up. It's this, she says, that allows open engagement and fluidity to exist. Completing a trio of great meetings with inspiring Access strategists in New York's museum and gallery sector was a discussion with Georgia Krantz at The Guggenheim. Georgia is Senior Manager For Adult and Access Programs and her vision is to make the museum a community of people who are inclusive by their very nature. It's a greater task than just layering access programs on top of it all, she says, it's grounding people in a civil rights issue. What she is saying is that the space and those who run it, with input from the disability community, must train themselves to become automatically access-enabling. Part of this, Georgia says, is meeting and training people in every department so that they think about implementing access ideas in their own work - finance, education, curation, all of it - to 'provide a ground of everyone being aware of who they are actually serving'. It's also about creating communities that break down barriers, rather than isolating or defining people. The specific programs that Georgia has created certainly follow this model. Her idea is that a program should become a hub of community - she says, 'yes we look at art together, but that's almost secondary - bring your family, bring your friends' - and that that hub of community stems outwards from a deliberately pro-inclusive viewpoint. Her work with visually impaired visitors is a case in point. She started the Mind's Eye program five years ago with a focus on experienced art educators facilitating visually impaired visitors' experience of art through touch tours and audio description. What has developed is a very established teaching pedagogy. Instead of the Art Educator telling you what they think, their job is to respond to the visitor, to facilitate the experience rather than create it. It's part of breaking down barriers, Georgia says. "The program has developed from the educator describing an art work exactly how they see it, to the educator asking how each participant sees it". For each participant, with a different level of sight and a different interpretative stance, will add a unique and stimulating view point to the others. As a confluence of ideas and readings, together the group will 'see' the picture. As Georgia says, "there is no hierarchy in my 20 20 vision". What others see is completely enlightening to her perspectives, as well as vice versa. The positivity of new perspectives that come from diverse bodies is entirely welcomed. And this is an engaging example for a potential arts organisation for people with and without disabilities in Britain. It's not just a matter of bringing people with and without disabilities together and putting them in a room in front of art, it's enabling them to feed off

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each other's unique perspectives as artists or individuals who want to experience that world. Georgia is keen that The Guggenheim's Mind's Eye project isn't a segregated opportunity. In fact they have recently extended it from an evening session to a day program as well. This is not only so that more people can get to the event. By making it a day program, it's likely that other visitors will organically become a part of the tour itself, and with prompting from an art educator, an integrative experience will be enabled to occur. The logic is simple - people are going to come up anyway to overhear the discussion, so why not make this into a positive experience bringing diverse people together. This idea strikes me as a furtive one for British practice, certainly in well-attended public art spaces, because it organically enables diverse viewpoints and integration. Allowing sighted visitors to interact with a program that originates in the validity of the perspectives of visually impaired people is educative for those who underestimate individuals with visual impairment's interest in the arts and allows a meeting point over shared interests. One concern may be that an overspill of sighted visitors would submerge the diversity of perspectives into a majority of voices from the non-disabled community. Georgia notes, however, that by removing the stigma of diverse viewpoints, new leaders have emerged. In fact some of her original group of visually impaired participants have begun taking their own tours. Different models can be established. Georgia is keen to say that good teaching is absolutely vital. Certain projects across the country will have no doubt failed, she states, because teachers have neither the experience to know that people with disabilities are simply people, or enough art knowledge to facilitate an engaging and educative class. She plans to install new projects, one aimed initially at the Deaf community and another for people with dementia at the Guggenheim in the near future, as well as continuing outreach work at a nearby school for the blind. Ultimately, however, her vision is that access programs will one day become a thing of the past. The museum will be so grounded in inclusivity that all will feel fully included as individual visitors to a truly public space. The importance of engaging with Museums in this project was to interrogate the potential openness of existing public spaces to all comers. I also wanted to meet with organisations whose main interest was to support professional artists from minority communities, to gain an insight about art and the possibility of community integration at this more specialised level. A rich meeting with David Terry at The New York Federation Of The Arts impressed upon me that the importance of an artistic community for professional artists is to furnish them with a sense of identity about their own work, and to enable artistic opportunities through contacts, support, advice and collaboration. NYFA is a governmental organisation that exists to provide grants and training for New York State Artists who apply through a number of schemes, most notably their flagship Fellowship scheme. They also provide a huge online database of resources and opportunities for professional artists in the area, and particular programs for artists from minority backgrounds. For Terry, professional artists gain strength from artistic communities. It may be a connection through professional work, he says, but fundamentally it's 'where your people are', the people who hold you together. There is clear take-away here for those interested in potential meeting points for diverse individuals through art. Firstly, while the arts might be a good area for individuals to meet

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over shared interests, the different ways in which people engage in the arts should not be over-looked. Secondly, the formation of diverse communities should not be understood as a replacement for existing communities, especially those formed because of shared experience or background. The succour people experience from meeting those who have shared similar experiences to them is as vital as the need for individuals to meet those of wildly different backgrounds. Both have clear and demonstrable social advantages. Other Points To Take Away: - The importance of online resources is that anyone with a computer can access them from home. Such networks allow fuller participation in a relatively inaccessible world. - Projects need proper resources if participants are to have pride in them. Terry works with a project called Materials For The Arts, which donates first class art supplies to projects on small budgets. This model would be hugely welcomed in the UK. - While the core mission of a project shouldn't have to change, the means of getting to that message can be flexible. For David, the balance for artists is being drawn by available resources to a mission you didn't set out to achieve, and achieving all you can with the maximum resources. That evening, following a tip, I managed to get to the play Tribes off-Broadway. Tribes is the story of Billy, a boy born deaf, and his family, a group of attention seeking intellectuals. Rapier wit and comebacks are de rigour for this clan, but Billy (Russell Harvard, himself a Deaf actor) remains on the outskirts. As clever and interested as the rest of his group, his parents' decision to not teach him sign language (so as to not initiate him into an exclusivist tribe) means he has stayed locked in theirs - a lonely island of lip-reading. That is until Billy meets Sylvia, a signing member of the Deaf community, and unlocks a world of inclusivism and intrigue. The play, first at the Royal Court in London and now New York, is an excellent piece that enables an entertaining introduction to the politics of the Deaf community, the exclusivism of families, language and the importance of enablement. Much of the play is signed, and having Russell at the core makes it a faithful piece of art that backs up its interest in the Deaf community. It's an exceptional piece and its themes are likely to stay with people. Whether it will move them to further engagement is a different question. A night out of the theatre is a bit of a break and relaxation. Still, it's worth commenting on in this context because lessons can be learned. - Artistic performance, if done well, is a good way of unpacking issues of disability for an uninitiated audience. - The visibility of disabled actors, a necessity for a credible portrayal of someone with a disability, is a rejoinder to the idea of disability as lack of ability. It also rightly unites talented actors of all backgrounds under the banner of good artistic work. In an abstract sense it is an important integration strategy, as people with disabilities become the authors of their own portrayal and people without disabilities come to learn their stories. My meeting with The Alliance For Inclusion In The Arts the next day picked up both of these notions; of professionalism in the arts and the adequate representation of people with disabilities in performance roles.

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I met with Sharon Jensen who set up the organisation 25 years ago, and David Harrell, the company's Disability and Programming associate (who somehow also manages to fit in creating and performing one-man performances up and down the country). Both were hugely articulate about the Alliance's mission to educate, inform and assist theatre, television and film companies in implementing diverse practices, most specifically the inclusion of artists and performers with colour and those who identify with a disability. The performing arts remains hugely unrepresentative of people with disabilities. David quoted a statistic that less than 1 and half percent of anything said on television is by someone with a disability, despite the fact that 20 per cent of Americans have disabilities. The result, of course, is that when a person with disability appears on stage or television, people's instinct is to ask why they are there. Is this a plot twist? Surely their disability can't be incidental to the play, or the character, it must have a meaning. It goes without saying that the focus of this organisation once again is artists, professional performers. It's not about art as a hobby or therapy, or even really as a way of engaging with integration. Still there are many lessons of general import. Chief among these, says Sharon, is that respect should be earned not because of someone's disability, but because of someone's gift: "It's about what the gift is". This is to say that seeing people positively, not patronisingly, enables actual relationships to mature and develop, and to allow a genuine gaze at an individual's talent. David seconds this, whilst affirming his pride at being a member of the disability community. Unlike what much of TV offers, he says, disability is not something to be fixed, it's a positive community to be a part of. The importance of celebrating people's talents may sound fairly uncontroversial to many, especially so when discussing professional artists. What particularly interested me, however, was how you communicate valid opinions like this, as well as those we've already discussed, to people who have little or no experience of disability, who automatically digest society's medical model of understanding. It's what engaged me in my topic of research in the first place; that in Britain there is little work to counter the space between the disability community's increasingly sophisticated and self-authored understanding of themselves, and the understanding of those with little or no experience of it. From its work engaging and consulting with various arts organisations, the Alliance is well placed to offer a number of points on this matter. Sharon and David gave me these thoughts: - There is no one answer. You have to meet people where they are. Some people are advanced in this issue, some aren't. - Never shame and blame. It's about finding where people are and how we can take the next steps. - Create space outside of the working day for people to think and be reflective on these issues, because they require time, and testing assumptions doesn't usually happen in the rush of the every day. - Create a safe environment to engage in these conversations. A space that is off the record, if people feel afraid of questioning they can't hear the answer. Amongst all this wisdom, the conundrums of instituting such findings into a specific arts organisation in Britain should be noted. Firstly, whether such enriched understandings can happen organically in a community setting is debatable. Secondly, what happens if we

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wish to engage with people who aren't art professionals but are merely interested or engaged in the pleasure of art. Before moving on, it's wise to say that I'm aware this inclination to discuss the understanding of disability with the non-disability community may strike some people with disabilities as rather bemusing, or at worst another case of engagement with the majority, not the minority, community. I would argue it's vital. While affirming the vitality of the progression of the disability independence movement, the importance of disabled leaders in mainstream society and the vibrancy of disability culture, we know - even without the statistics from Scope mentioned in the report's introduction - that we live in an imperfect world. People's prejudices and misunderstandings of the nature of disability, as well as unthinking structural barriers, continue to affect individuals on a day to day basis. Whilst the lessons of new understandings of a disabled vision must originate in the narratives of people with disabilities themselves, both people with and without disabilities will benefit from these perspectives, and creating these opportunities for exchange is down to both communities. I discussed a successful opportunity for exchange between professional actors from both disabled and non-disabled communities with the effervescent Ike Schamberlin, the creator of Theatre Breaking Through Barriers, a theatre company where actors who identify with diverse disabilities share the stage with those who do not. He's also great company. His company started thirty three years ago as Theatre By The Blind but branched out to more diverse practice 6 years back. He told me that this diversification has also led to his realisation that he's now building a theatre company, not just an acting company. He's looking for writers and even directors to help evolve the vision of integrated work. For Ike, the key to the success of Theatre Breaking Through Barriers is, fundamentally, good work. The company's reputation brings in great actors, great actors bring great audiences, and the notion of inclusion happens organically at the same time as great art. Both, indeed, are vital. At the beginning of his journey, he told me, it was hard to convince potential audiences that we weren't a therapy organisation. That was their expectation. But when the work gets better, you don't have to tell anyone anymore, because it's obvious. They know by reputation you create professional work. And that's vital for enabling his actors, of whom David Harrell is one, to get out there and get more mainstream work on stage and film. Ike has spent most of his life working in unusual settings for theatrical performance. Before setting up Theatre By The Blind he directed plays at The Austen Reggs Psychiatric Institution in Massachusetts. There, again, he set about focussing on art not therapy. And, again, because of good reviews - actors would be attracted to the work. This included actors from the community theatres who came in search of good parts and a good director. The up-shot was actors with and without mental health issues came together and 'we did Shaw and Shakespeare and Arthur Miller, and we sold seats!'. Doing good work doesn't mean that things went on precisely as they would in any other company. Atypical adjustments to set or performance structure could be made to allow the actors to reach their full potential, but this was part of the creative strategy of the company. For a blind actor, says Ike, specific carpeting might help, or the geometric shape of the cast, or ropes and half ramps - either out of the sight of audiences, or constructed

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deliberately as part of the set. You find out little tricks for enhancing performance over the years, he said, as all directors should. Ike is keen on creating integrative practice because it creates new perspectives, both professionally and socially. In his own words 'he likes to mix it up', it opens up new avenues for disabled and non-disabled actors and disabled and non-disabled audience members alike. It's also about the truth of casting. There are great actors with Down syndrome who can play parts specified for an individual with Down syndrome, so why should they be played by other actors who can't faithfully reproduce that experience. Being comfortable with that diverse cast on stage also allows an audience to relax, says Schamberlin. "All people, blind or disabled, spend five minutes trying to figure out who has disabilities and who doesn't, then they give up". We're comfortable with what we're offering, so our audience gets comfortable too. We'll tell you the story. The audience are also part of the story. The best audiences, Ike thinks, are when there is the biggest mix of disabled and non-disabled people. That happens usually when the material being performed is new writing to do with the disability experience, but it can be when the company is performing more traditional work also. Sometimes performances have been designed with a disabled audience in mind. Ike gets a kick out of reading stage directions and introductions on stage as a creative strategy that enables an audience with visual impairments to experience the physicality of the play, as well as a distinct philosophy of theatre. Indeed though Ike's main hope is that his audience will respect and enjoy the work, he also hopes that they might re-think their ideas of disability (whether disabled or not) as well. He is creating a space for that to happen, both on and off stage. The success of his project is no doubt in large part due to the draw of good work and good actors. It is also, I think, due to great leadership from Ike himself. His company is founded on his skill and purpose and sheer hard-work and yet from our conversation it is clear he is also committed to the narratives of people with disabilities as a guiding force for his practice. The company work on a main play from April to June and then create a series of short plays for a short play festival for the summer. This is new writing and the theme can come from the cast themselves. Last year the cast said they didn't want to be defined by disability, and so chose to pursue a different angle in these short works. This year their decision may be different. Schamberlin will likely produce great work, either way. He has created a company attracting great writers and actors and a way of integration that feels neither patronising nor manicured nor insubstantial. It's Theatre Breaking Through Barriers. I was keen to open up the question of integration through joint artistic endeavour to as many diverse art forms as possible, so I arranged a meeting with Joseph N. Straus to discuss music and disability theory. Joseph is Distinguished Professor of Music at the Graduate Centre of The City University Of New York and the author of a number of books on music and disability. By now I was beginning to get used to the hustle and bustle of New York. Still that morning I found myself dodging yellow taxis and pretzel sellers having taken a wrong turn downtown. Thankfully Joseph didn't remark on how bedraggled I looked. A hugely intelligent and articulate correspondent, his thoughts were incredibly useful (despite me panting breathlessly for the first 15 minutes of our meeting.)

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We began by discussing the two dominant models of artistic engagement for people with disabilities that I had so far come across. Firstly professional work, where a company deliberately states its intention to engage with diverse performers and attracts clearly talented individuals to its ranks or those seeking to improve. Secondly, more targeted groups often sponsored by public institutions where individuals come for community or individual enjoyment. Of the latter, the problem for integration - as a number of my interviewees had remarked - is that opening up these groups to the non-disability community would risk the infection of the charity model. Individuals could join with the wrong assumptions, when countering that gap was a primary intention. For Joseph there is a further model, which all too frequently dominates musical programming, namely the therapeutic - music as a therapeutic tool to remediate some sort of pathological conditions. Though there can be good work in this field, Joseph argued, its dominance has submerged a focus on the pleasure of music. The focus is so often on music bringing an individual with disabilities out of themselves, to teach them something or make them social - but "music is fun! It's fun to share and make music together, let's not insist it has some demonstrable educational value - it's an intrinsic, valuable human expression." A musician myself, this was music to my ears. Indeed for me music's ability to introvert, to send oneself into a more interior state, is as profound. For the sake of this project I was interested more in understanding the potentiality of a pleasurable grass-roots community experience for people with and without disabilities than an individual encounter. Joseph told me there was some good work in that field. The Artism Ensemble run by Michael Bakan at Florida State University is a mixed ensemble of neuro-typical people and individuals with developmental disabilities, mostly autism. They make music together and tour the country. A community brought together by an interest in the pleasure of music and playing with diverse individuals from diverse backgrounds. Joseph also mentioned the national organisation Very Special Arts, whom I would visit later in O'ahu. For Joseph these are true success stories for whilst emphasising the importance of pleasure in musical activity, they also begin to extol the importance of musical education. The temptation for facilitators is to under-sell the abilities of the people they're dealing with, he remarked. To facilitate an active engagement in music we can go beyond clapping - "let's learn to play the violin and see where we go" - in this way we counter the prejudice that people with profound disabilities can't learn. Technique should not be a dirty word. Indeed Straus argues that not only can everybody have access to music at some level, but also disability does not have to be the dividing line for people's enjoyment. Amusia, the medical term for tone deafness, for instance, has no correspondence with the typical body. Even the Deaf community, whom many assume to be non-musical, can have profound relationships to music - feeling music, interacting with music, seeing it. This is a keen interest of Joseph's, how bodies shape how you hear. "Deaf listeners, blind listeners, autistic listeners, mobility impaired listeners - non normative embodiments shape the way those individuals perceive and make music". I asked Joseph him whether the value of these unique enabled perspectives can correspond to a group experience, or whether public projects like Artism have succeeded because of particular boundaries (individuals with autism are of a certain frequency here to enable an understanding atmosphere). His response was that it was a clear question with a not-so-clear answer. At the same time as stating his own moral conviction towards

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integration not segregation, he also recognised the impulse 'to be with your gang'. Rightly, he suggested, they don't have to be out of sync. So what finally about potential infections of the charity model? Might a remedy, I suggest, be to begin with friends and family who want to play music together, 'buddies', who then invite more 'buddies' and so on. A controlled environment of concentric circles of rightly-focussed individuals seeking community? For Joseph, the key was a continual focus on the individuals involved. A program may look abstractly like a sound integrated atmosphere, but if the individuals aren't benefitting or having fun what's the point? Practice cannot overtake practitioners. People come first. Continuing this line of thought, Dan Cohen's Music And Memory Project is an excellent example of a project using music to make people come first. Dan began the project when he realised that the technological invention of the IPod could bring about a personalised experience of pleasure to individuals in care facilities in a relatively cheap and manageable way. His experience of care facilities for elderly people was they tended to focus on what was required, and avoided what would cost extra money. With it came a lack of attention to the individual. The central prejudice he came across was that the elderly and those with advanced dementia could no loner experience pleasure. "They are fed and medicated 'til they're done". With relatively little thought being given to increasing an individuals' quality of life, it wasn't a huge surprise to Dan that upon further research he found that no care facilities were using IPods whatsoever. So, he went to his Government Provider and started looking for a grant. What Music and Memory does is bring personalised music to individuals via a playlist designed specifically with them in mind, allowing a personal experience of pleasure that can go on all day. It has now been instituted in 16 states as well as Holland and Israel. At the root of this project is the primary care giver or family member. They will choose up to 200 songs to add to the playlist. They're encouraged to think long and hard about the music that a specific individual loved, may have loved, or perhaps experienced in their youth. Were they in a choir? Did they love musicals? What records are in their garage? This individual attention breaks the cycle of music in nursing homes being just another routine, with the same CD playing continuously in a communal living room. Your playlist is there to enliven you. Dan told me that the project then expanded from nursery homes to those with cognitive impairments because of a suggestion that it might have therapeutic benefits for individuals with dementia. Neurologic research had shown that musical memories are located in the brain near the same place as autobiographical memories: if you fire one you might fire the other. And pleasurable memories have certainly been created for a great deal of individuals participating in the scheme as the short film 'Alive Inside' (which became a viral sensation) attests. Here Henry, a man living in a care home for 10 years, becomes physically and emotionally ecstatic on hearing his favourite music from years before. His face is etched with happiness.

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For the purposes of thinking about art as non-patronising way of engaging diverse individuals, there a number of points to think upon and digest from Music and Memory as a guide to best practice. - Firstly, for Cohen, Music and Memory is part of the greater-culture of person-centred care. Slowly institutions are beginning to realise, he says, that quality of life is not enhanced by one size fits all practices. While some like to wake early, others prefer a lie in. For quality of life to be enhanced, each individual's accommodations should be treated meaningfully. Personalisation should be an ethical standard for treatment of people all-too-often on the margins of society. - Secondly, Music and Memory is revolutionary to the extent that it allows the individual to feel engaged artistically all day. Unlike classes or one-off projects, the individual has the choice when and where to feel inspired by music. It allows that connection to continue throughout the day without a facilitator. This is particularly important in regards to individuals in nursing homes, says Cohen, for studies show that for 90 per cent of the day individuals are idle. This lack of stimulation means a lack of brain activity and causes entropy. - Thirdly, and perhaps most cogently for this report, studies have shown that Cohen's IPod Project is excellent ground for further social engagement. While some worried that putting headphones on individuals might isolate them from the day to day, instead it has enabled social conversation - about favourite tunes and new memories - and sharing - of new tracks. Perhaps this ground of engagement could even create long-term community events like one-off monthly projects say, where individuals come together to listen to music they have curated, or make music along to tracks they enjoy. Perhaps even the music they have created together could be added to their IPod. This is to say that networks of creative engagement between the individual and a number of different groups are increasingly becoming possible through new technology. I have never been to a dance studio before. I've only ever seen them on Strictly Come Dancing. So it was both surreal and fascinating to find myself in a mirror-walled space watching a fluid display of beautiful movement as Kitty Lunn and her company Infinity Dance rehearsed for an up-coming performance. Kitty's work is as impressive as she is. She began in traditional ballet, obtaining a scholarship to the Washington School of Ballet as a young woman. Training for a broadway show in 1987 she slipped on ice and broke her back. The accident meant she needed to use a wheelchair for mobility. So, in 1995 Kitty founded Infinity Dance as a non-traditional dance company featuring dancers with and without disabilities. It tours all over the world and Kitty remains committed to teaching the traditional techniques that she learnt as a student, translating the moves when needs be for people with limited limb movement, and in doing so creating a new lexicon of dance. Like Theatre Breaking Through Barriers, this company is an example of good work attracting individuals from both the disability and non-disability communities, who want to work with other talented performers. Kitty is resolute that she would never add a dancer with disabilities to the fold simply because they had disabilities. As with the dancers in the company who don't identify with a disability, it's a question of commitment, physicality (i.e. who can partner who) and ultimately sheer talent. At the moment only Kitty and one other dancer in the group, Alice, use wheelchairs. It's a matter of professional ability. "To level the playing field, me and Alice have to be better than good because when people first see us they don't even think of us as dancers."

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Kitty also spends a great deal of her time teaching people of all abilities, ages and disabilities. She charges very little (often nothing), because people on the disability spectrum generally have fixed income and she knows that costs can be a real barrier. She teaches basic technique and choreography and says that teaching has shown her how society's lack of attention to individuals obstructs happiness and development. Paying attention to people and finding creative methods of allowing everyone to join in and learn enables individuals to be themselves. Kitty told me about a little girl, for instance, who had very restricted movement of her body but loved ballet. So Kitty taught her traditional dance moves, translating movement of the body to movement of her finger or wheelchair. She also told me about an autistic boy who had been written off by his teachers as non-responsive until she created a group program about the planets, around the circles he would occasionally make. Being at the centre of it all "he smiled larger than he had before". The lesson here is simply that good leadership of a program can enable everyone's creative engagement. For Kitty, including people is not enough. The main point she wanted me to go with is the importance of teaching. Whether her students are 9 years old or above, she expects people to learn. We don't all learn the same way, she told me, but we can all learn. The biggest discrimination towards people with special needs is that they can't. Individuals may have had very tough lives, but not teaching them does not help that. Basic nutrition, for example, must be taught, for movement becomes harder as people put on weight. Often, Kitty remarked, what she finds is that a class will have learnt not to learn. From school or sheltered workshops individuals have accepted that they 'can't' learn and will have become damaged, depressed or lazy. But, demanding something from her students allows them to allow themselves to move in a way that they never thought possible. It gives them a permission to care about themselves and to stop telling themselves they can't do it. This is why as a teacher she doesn't suffer bad attitudes in class. Some people with disabilities who have newly arrived at their state, she says, have a certain anger and a bitterness, but in dance your body is your instrument, and if you hate

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your instrument it's not going to co-operate with you. Kitty thinks that countering these attitudes requires disabled teachers who can reprimand kids for not doing their homework,without feeling they are shouting at "young crippled people". Certainly it can enable a quicker evaluation of whether behavioural issues are in fact cognitive, or genuinely behavioural. As well as the value of her pedagogy for artistic programs in Britain - particularly the value of genuine teaching and inclusive improvisation - her performances are of note here too. For as well as The Elements Concert, of which I saw a rehearsal, Kitty runs a fascinating program called The Women's stories project. Here, a group of women - some professional dancers, some not - tell diverse stories through movement and dance. Kitty tells her own story alongside a variety of others, including a nun discussing the difficulties of her vocation and a Turkish woman's tale of grief. The audience are encouraged to discuss the work at the end of the performance, to realise their own connections with these stories. In this way Kitty controls the narrative of her disability whilst allowing others to engage in the universal themes of her story. I was interested in this notion of building a community around the themes established in performance. So my last meeting in New York with the excellent Ravit Turjeman and Isaac Zablocki the festival co-directors of the Reelabilities Film Festival couldn't have been more timely. Ravit and Isaac work at the Jewish Cultural Centre in New York. The centre has had a pretty active program of events for people with disabilities over the years but that developed into an entire film festival when Anita Altman, its future founder, realised that showing films effected real change in people. In Altman's experience, people's reaction to films trumped a good deal of her other outreach work. So together the centre conceived of a film festival as a way to present films related to the disability experience to the mainstream public in a way that was completely inclusive and engaging to all. Currently in it's fourth year, Reelabilities has grown to 23 participating locations in New York and shows around 50 programs over 5 days of showings each year. Two years ago Reelabilities went national. They are currently curating festivals in 12 cities in the U.S. The films Isaac and Ravit choose for the festival follow a particular ethos. One of their core principals is to choose submissions not just based on their tastes, but films which offer a progressive approach to disability. "The films we chose are often quite in your face. Making fun of the attitudes people have towards disability. So, it's quite sassy", Ravit says. What this creates is a fairly edgy festival, which is not embarrassed of anything. This in turn creates an environment for a diverse audience to speak their minds. The films let people open up a bit more. Not all the work is about disability. Thematically, submissions will be considered where the relationship with disability is strong enough in a multitude of ways possible. Isaac and Ravit tell me that they enjoy work where the theme is not about disabled life per say, but comes from a disabled auteur and so on. Fundamentally though, as well as making sure of a diverse selection of films covering as many different relations to disability as possible, what is key is the standard of the work. Isaac and Ravit are film people with backgrounds in the industry and fundamentally want a festival showing great works. What is particularly exemplary is that the festival's focus on progressiveness extends further than just the films they show. As well as fully committing to the 'nothing about us,

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without us' philosophy, which says that anything about disability must engage fully with people from that community, they also pursue their mission by trying to bring the festival to people in their communities. That is rather than expecting people to come to one single venue. And further, Ravit and Isaac are keen to express that accessibility doesn't end with getting wide-enough entry ways to venues. It's about respectable accommodating venues, as well as a box office that is trained to meet people with different disabilities. Indeed they have pursued this through-line in an innovative way, by partnering with venues rather than renting them - so the venues take on the mission, seeing it as theirs. Ravit and Isaac also see Reelabilities as a great way of enabling a meeting point between the disability and non-disability community. The progressiveness and attention to detail with which they curate the festival enables a fully inclusive experience where diverse individuals can meet. To create debate around issues of disability, all films are followed by a facilitated conversation. This creates a platform for interaction between people with and without disabilities. It also enables individuals with different disabilities to speak to each other, again to which there is often no easy forum. The warm atmosphere means that questions flow, the uninitiated are free to make mistakes, and people engage with each other on many different levels. But creating a community around the themes within the films also requires getting new audiences to the movies and the issues they raise. Again Reelabilities has achieved this in an innovative way. By cross-marketing their films they allow new audiences to come together. If a film is an animated tale of the journey of an individual with disability, they will spread the word to animation appreciation societies. If it's a film from South East Asia, Chinese Clubs will be specifically invited. In this way, an organic forum for new alliances is created. According to Ravit, 80 per cent of the auditorium will often be filled by people who haven't been before. Adding Reelabilities reputation as a great film festival means that new audiences are continually coming across the issues on display. Incidentally, none of this means that the festival is static, either. Ravit and Isaac continue to learn from participant feedback and the accessibility standards of the different venues they show films in. It has led them, for instance, to recently install a TTY line in their box office as well as live audio descriptions for many of their films. They are keen to expand in other ways too. Recently, they have added other artistic performances at the festival. Again this has brought in a new crowd - one who haven't necessarily been attracted to the filmic element of the festival in previous years, but can now experience musical performance, dance and readings while also engaging with important issues. "It becomes a meeting place for people in this world and people who aren't a part of this world to join in too" says Ravit, as well a way of exposing artists with disabilities to a wider public. Isaac thinks that the festival has spread because of a lack of cultural organisations, unlike say advocacy groups, engaging with disability. It's also due to this continual cross-pollination of audiences around inspiring art. He's quite clear, however, that ultimately "there shouldn't be a need for a disability film festival, a point where the mainstream have accepted these works, cinema has become truly accessible and disabled actors get the work they deserve. But that's still far away." And so there ended my time in New York. With a mountain of wisdom to process and an exciting path ahead. I set off for Toronto.

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Toronto Enriched by my experiences in New York I flew across the border to Toronto, Canada. It had been a cornerstone of my itinerary from the very off, for Toronto is home to the annual Abilities Arts Festival. The festival describes itself as a Multifaceted and Multidisciplinary festival of visual and performing arts providing opportunities to showcase artistic excellence by persons with disabilities. (abilitiesartsfestival.org) It encourages, as with Reelabilities, a community around the issues of disability, as well as promoting disabled artists into the mainstream. Vitally, it also maintains links to mainstream art events and institutions, meaning it has the opportunity to engage in wider dialogue throughout the city. One of the key art events The Abilities Arts Festival engages with is Nuit Blanche, an annual all-night arts festival, where museums, galleries and independent artists fill the city with spectacles and pop-up exhibitions for free. I arrived, jet lagged and a tiny bit confused, on that night itself and would walk the streets till 3am taking in the wonder of it all. My first port of call was A Queen Street Cartography - the event The Abilities Arts Festival had themselves launched for Nuit Blanche. It was held at the newly opened 'Open Gallery' at the OCAD university, an accessible space at the heart of Toronto (more on this later). The event itself was fantastic. Peopled by an audience who had mostly stopped in deliberately, and some who hadn't, it took as its starting point Queen Street, a pivotal street for many Torontonians - a central nexus throughout the city, linking many areas and environs. Its streetcar is a central mode of transportation for many and yet isn't accessible for wheelchair users, nor will it be until next year. So Queen Street Cartography was an attempt to re-map the city street from the point of view of people with disabilities, a cartography of altered perspectives from people unseen or forgotten by the majority who ride with ease through its path. The night consisted of an installation of photography of disabled residents on Queen Street accompanied by searching text about questions of disability, a musical performance from an artist with disabilities and four audio pieces called Pod Plays screened as films with accompanying abstract imagery. Free popcorn and hot chocolate were handed out and T Shirts advertising the abilities art festival were free to all as well.

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The Pod Plays form part of a greater project called The Listening Post (see below). They are city-specific stories, in the form of a walking tour almost, told from the perspective of a person with disability or mental health issue, and set to music. The idea is that you follow the directions of the person's journey, and through it that journey becomes your own. Queen's Street Cartography was a clever way of promoting an issue of disability in a way which was accessible, engaging and pleasurable even for those who weren't part of the community and were coming across the issue for the first time. The night felt cool, the space was familiar and it was likely that people could wander in as it was located next to a number of other projects that night. It was a way of presenting a disability issue by saying look again at the familiar, but from a different angle. Creatively, it was a way of asking for allies to an important cause. The very next day, Abilities ran The Listening Post again. This time the format was different. You got to borrow an IPod and actually do the tour yourself! As I had seen two of the pieces the night before, I chose to follow the stories of the others (they can still be downloaded here: http://abilitiesartsfestival.org/events/current-festival/the-listening-post/ ) Sharing the journey of another this time round was an incredibly intimate and moving experience. Following the wonderful voice of Catherine Frazee a doyenne of the disability arts and rights movements as she navigated her electronic wheelchair in and around Queen Street was incredibly powerful. Her tales of life, love and loss as a 'floppy person' became entirely real as together we journeyed through Queen Street and its environs, her speaking, me listening. It was a one-off artistic engagement, but as a forum for one person to speak and for a length of time at that, while another has to listen - it is a very engaging way of allowing people to experience lives they have not lived. With the narrator in complete control, the story can go in whatever direction they want to take it. The other piece I heard that day was Jan Derbyshire's I'm sorry Toronto, I really am - a comedy-tragedy about a woman destroying herself through drink and blaming her problems on the city she lives in. Jan takes us through a night that she thinks probably happened - the places she thinks she staggered around, told lies in or shouted at. The ambiguity of drunkenness is there in full effect, and once again you are with her as she describes it. This year the Abilities Arts Festival also ran a number of workshops, film showings and permanent exhibitions. Toronto At Street Level was a photography exhibition they put on in a small lobby space in Toronto's Carlton Cinema. It was the fruition of a 12 week workshop called Frames Of Reference, which was also run for the Festival by the artist Vincenzo Pietropaolo. The exhibition featured the work of 10 very different artists, each experienced with artistic work in some shape or form and each in some way a participant in disability culture. As Rina Fraticelli, the executive director of the Abilities Arts festival surmised: 'it captures the abilities arts festival purpose - to create opportunities for artists with disabilities to realise their talent; and for all of us to enjoy the benefits of their invaluable perspectives.' What interested me about the exhibition is that visitors coming to the cinema are likely to stumble over the work, and with it a number of different perspectives. Thankfully, it is an inviting collection which doesn't preach, but which allows the individual to engage with 10 very different artists' works (each artist exhibited 2 images), some containing quite complex themes and ideas. The works are united by their grounding in a diverse understanding of the city. This familiar reference point is vital. It allows the local onlooker

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common ground with the artist as well as a familiar conduit through which to embrace unfamiliar viewpoints. Vincenzo writes that 'our goal was to capture the nuances of city life, attempting to transmit in particular the humanism of a city that is still unsure of how to deal with accessibility issues for residents with physical disabilities'. It also helped that the work was of a very high standard. Mark Brose depicts the contradictions of an inaccessible city with an incredible shot of an elderly woman in a wheelchair attempting to navigate a concrete ramp, her family attempting to help her, her face wrought with worry and tension. The ramp has been left to deteriorate into a dangerous condition. My favourite work was that of Allan Cullen, which has a distinctly political aim - to raise awareness of the Ontario Disability Support Program, which provides services like proper medical care, hearing aids and dental services for its members. Alan writes in the introduction to his work that the service, combined with an earlier photography course, stopped him from becoming homeless. And so his work looks through the lens of those homeless individuals with disabilities who navigate the streets around him at night - their forgotten lives, their disabling situations, their beauty. Cullen photographs one homeless man on the subway, folded, holding a ripped sign that reads: 'Can you help please. Waiting for disability. Spare change please. Thank you. God bless.' I found the ambiguity of 'Waiting for disability' in the photograph quite striking. While the surface reading is 'waiting for disability benefit' (which has either not come or won't), another possible reading is that here is a man who has no choice but disability, a participant in a social situation in which disablement is sure and fateful. Diversity is the best way to sum up the exhibition. In Vincenzo's introduction, this diversity refers to the fact that varied perspectives of individuals with diverse bodies means that in this world disability can became positive artistic ability. As a group exhibition diversity is also evident at a more basic level - the variety of the photographs on show. You can't help but think of a plurality of voices. And without a guide on hand, the exhibition became a space curated by people with disabilities narrating their experiences, but which an uninitiated public was allowed to experience at their own speed. Such opportunities should not be under-estimated. Though localised, this type of impromptu exhibition can create a dialogue about disability which embraces interest from the non-disability community in a smart and engaging manner. I was lucky enough to have time to interview Rina Fraticelli, the Executive Director of The Abilities Arts Festival, about the work, art and integration. Rina has been running the festival for about a year and a half. This is her second time in charge. Her background is Film and Culture and she has worked at promoting opportunities for under-represented communities for a good deal of her professional life. Rina agreed with my thesis that unless you are a member of the disability community, you get few opportunities to learn from or meet with individuals who are, and the festival is important in that respect. But she began by telling me that a common strain in North America was to see art work about people in a marginalised community, yet little art work by the people in those communities themselves. Work that depicts how they see the world. And The Abilities Arts Festival is there to provide such a platform for mainstream artists with disabilities, as well as engaging with issues of the disability community. "The idea has been work exclusively by people with disabilities telling stories form their perspective and yet the challenge is really how you make this interesting and get it into the mainstream."

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Yet as well as engaging with that mainstream, Rina's interest is in a continually deepening engagement with the community that is at the heart of the festival. In the next year and a half her aim is to have all programming chosen by a community of artists with disabilities so that they are curating themselves. This is also a key reason why the festival is developing from a once a year event to a rolling program of art all year round. Touring it to other cities and elongating the program of events will bring artists with disabilities in the regions more into the fold, and bring income to the talent they discover. It's creating a sustainable model for an artistic platform, in other words, rather than a symbol of people's work. For similar reasons, Abilities now also run a children's festival every year. A full day of performances give role models, as well as superb entertainment, to the children with disabilities who are invited to watch. I asked Rina about art as a meeting place, specifically to whether Abilities might make non-disabled audiences think about issues of accessibility in their own home, say, or question prejudices they have towards people they don't truly know. She replied that one piece that had worked at last year's festival was a dance performance that combined high level professional dancers with and without disabilities. It brought in a number of people who didn't expect to see each other. Some did think, she added, that the work was too similar to what they might see on other more mainstream platforms. Critiques of programming like this will always abound though, she states. From the other side of spectrum, there are individuals who find the label of 'disability arts' too restrictive. They wish to be identified or to see the work as the product of artists, without remainder. For me The Abilities Arts Festival is a way of engaging with these debates itself. And further it casts them in a positive rather than negative light. As a cyclical and multi-disciplinary arts festival it allows many different opinions to occur and progress year on year through engaging and often beautiful works - rather than say cold critique (necessary as those may be). As an open space for different audiences to come and feel enriched, it curates art as a bridge for people to walk over. To come and explore people's thoughts, identities or the wider issues of the disability community. I was still keen to learn lessons widely. I wished to visit as many programs as possible where there was a clear, meaningful interface between art and disability, not just those which set out to engage with diverse communities. So that evening I travelled to the edge of town to participate in Dramaworks, a program of drama for teens and young adults with intellectual and development disabilities. The program is one of many different opportunities - Singingworks, Movieworks, Rhythymworks - run by Dramaway, a company set up and run by Danielle Strnad who was leading Dramaworks that evening. In all, Dramaway have over 14 programs on offer in conjunction or partnership with day programs and schools or daycare centres across the Greater Toronto Area. Dramaworks itself provides an opportunity for kids to experience drama, leading up to a grand performance at the end of a term of night classes. While I was there 20 or so participants were led ably by Danielle and her excellent volunteers through some introductory exercises, character exploration with masks and small props (we donned the characters of Bernard Beaver, birds and chipmunks), ideas of narrative, and passive learning by imitation, explored in an environment that Danielle kept calm, fun and under control. It was very physical, with a lot of running around, and also very musical - Danielle sings everything. Patterns of welcome and goodbye are set to a fun singing accompaniment.

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With many different kids attending, levels of interest and engagement varied, but Danielle has an excellent eye for inclusion, creativity and organisation. Different needs were catered for - tolerance to noise levels registered, and so on - but at the same time the group was unified in a purpose. Danielle gets the kids to sign a group contract at the outset of the term, outlining the aims and foundations of the course. Key to the function of the class were Danielle and her art leaders. They demonstrated each scene to the group first, so as to give a sense of where the boundaries of the character and scene were. And they knew who might need initiating into the activity as well. Inclusion was key. It is something I will take away - in an artistic program attended by a number of diverse individuals, participation and engagement can be difficult. Good leadership is essential. Still I wished to cast my net even wider. Famous People Players is a black light puppetry theatre and dining company based in Toronto, which also tours worldwide. It is a non-profit organisation that was set up in 1974 by the inimitable Diane Dupuy as an employment scheme for people with intellectual disabilities. Those individuals share duties in dining room management, arts administration, and theatrical and visual arts performances. The company's original piece featured a life-size puppet of Liberace playing the piano. It is still the company's signature performance. When Liberace saw the show he was so impressed that he invited the group to perform with him. They did so for the next ten years in Las Vegas. Since then they have switched theatres, been featured on countless TV shows and created many new shows. The mission, however, is still very much the same. As Diane herself told me: "It's a professional company, we pay all the actors and use payments and donations and sponsorship to fund our theatre and the performers, who are all paid and can thus live independently." I attended a lunch time performance of a show featuring incredible, enormous puppets of Michael Jackson and Elvis bopping along to a soundtrack of their own music, accompanied by a number of deliberately funny props and monsters. There was a lovely atmosphere amongst the sizeable crowd, due no doubt in part to Diane's seasoned professionalism. She's provides an almost Joan Rivers-like quality to proceedings, introducing us to our three-course meal, as well as the show to follow and the philosophy behind it all. The restaurant side, Diane told me, was relatively new. It was created so that those performers who were as yet untrained or retiring had another set of vocational opportunities. It`s a thought-through approach. What I found inspiring about Famous People Players is that people looking for a good night out get it through an encounter with the talents of people with intellectual disabilities. As a model for creating sustainable jobs for performers and kitchen hands, this is why the scheme is worth of particular praise, Famous People Players puts forward the abilities of individuals who are often over-looked. It's not been an easy ride, Diane told me. Without a government grant they are continually raising funds (offering the space for hire, inviting big businesses to invite their clients for dinner and a show, seeking donations from any pot they can). Still Diane's dream of a slick organisation that offers great entertainment and addresses misplaced assumptions about individuals with learning difficulties is alive and kicking. By its very existence, it offers a positive encounter with people with intellectual disabilities, and their new scheme of offering workshops to school children is a sure way of instilling this to individuals who have yet to be tarnished by societal prejudice.

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As well as gathering information from artistic institutions, it was vital that I ground myself in the wider issues of disability independence and integration. I arranged a visit to The Centre Of Independent Living Toronto to meet with the Executive Director Sandra Carpenter and her team. It was a fascinating conversation. CILT was created in the early 1980s by people with physical disabilities fighting against consignment to life in an institution. They got around such patronising attitudes by introducing a self-help model whereby people with disabilities would support and enable each other. All CILT'S programs reflect that today. What has developed is a focus on helping people navigate systems. A key element of this is their Direct Funding Program (in Britain the system is known as direct payments). CILT provide the funds, originally funded from the ministry of health, to around 700 people in Ontario who are thus able to be the employer of their own attendants. They are enabled to recruit, hire and manage. CILT is the only consumer organisation who give these grants out in the world. Their independent living philosophy has broadened over the years. As well as stressing the use of funds to enable individuals to participate in communities, as well as services for the home, CILT as an organisation are involved in a wide-range of activities and institutions, representing people with disabilities. As their website says, Independent Living is about: Individuals living with dignity in their chosen community; participating in all aspects of their life; and controlling and making decisions about their own lives.

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To achieve this, CILT connect with a number of community partners - health stations, other disability groups and organisations - so they can represent individuals across the disability spectrum. As well as Direct Funding, a key part of their work is organising conferences to create discussion around key issues, and promoting them to the wider public. When I visited, they were planning a three day conference around the issues of parents with disabilities, ageing with a disability, and direct funding. CILT's work is trail-blazing and enlightening. Recently they have even run workshops presenting people with plain language documents from articles of the UN convention. Their commitment to rights and representation is amazing. A key point to take away for my own conclusions was a continual stress - whatever work they are doing - on working with other groups. CILT bring in as many organisations as possible, because they don't have all the answers. "Don't do work in a vacuum," was clear advice. What was most fascinating though was hearing about a project CILT had set up in 2006 called Gateways. Not only was it a hugely important project, but it also highlights a fundamental motivation behind my own work. Gateways was created by the impressive Nancy Barry, who runs a peer support program at CILT whilst also creating individual projects in areas in which she sees a need. After a bad experience in a clinical setting, Nancy realised that there was little to no access for women with disabilities in the context of cancer screening - "no disability awareness of how to accommodate women with disabilities". (Nancy Barry). So Nancy held focus groups with women with disabilities to find out in detail about their experiences of cancer screenings. She found similar results - many weren't even having Mammograms anymore because their experiences had got so bad. Ensuing focus groups with health care professionals found that in fact health care providers were often afraid to ask, scared they would offend, and frightened to touch disabled women in certain ways in case they hurt them. Nancy's solution was to create a 15 minute DVD providing health care providers with information on how to support people with disabilities when they come for cancer screening, as well as educating women on what to ask for and spreading publicity for the issue through conferences. I found this is all incredibly inspiring and resonant with my focus in this fellowship. The Gateways project is a clear and vital illustration that the lack of non-patronising meeting points for the disability and non-disability community create bad consequences. The result is a fear amongst the non-disability community that they lack the knowledge of the 'grammar of disability' - of the right thing to say, how to act, how to do their jobs. A lack of experience in day to day life has meant that this fear can seep into the world of work, and in the case of cancer treatment, even cost lives. A key figure in the Independent Living Movement in Toronto who I would have the pleasure of meeting on a separate occasion is Audrey King. Audrey had in fact put me in touch with Sandra Carpenter, the director of CILT, as well many other figures during my stay in the States. It was testament both to her as a person and to the tight-knit community around issues of disability in Toronto, that her name would often pop up in conversation. By the time I finally had the chance to visit her, I felt part of that community. The openness of people in Toronto and their commitment to social issues was inspiring. Audrey was involved in the Independent Living movement before there was such a thing. Growing up in both England and Toronto had been a struggle because of a continual lack of public access. So when she was 16, Audrey began writing letters. It's simply what she thought one should do. Her first letter was to ask the authorities what arrangements were

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being made for people with disabilities who wished to attend a public visit by the Queen. She kept writing, and protesting, and slowly found her way into a community of people with disabilities who began working with the government to set up housing, attendant outreach and self-managed funding. It took a federal enquiry into the state of disability in Canada to start the Independent Living Centres across the country. The head of the enquiry, David Smith, was shocked at how different the testimonies varied from the doctors and authorities who spoke on behalf of people with disabilities to people with disabilities themselves. So he freed up some money for the creation of the Independent Living Centres across the country in the late 1980s for people to live their lives as they saw fit. Audrey acknowledges things have got better since then, but 'the medical authority model is still very strong'. Much of her recent work has involved lecturing how person-centred care should be understood really as customer relations. It's not a paradigm shift, she says, merely a request for the kind of standards that we all expect in services day to day. The difficulty is that the priorities of care users and care providers are completely polarised. For care users, what's most important is maximising the control of the service-user and the relationships they have with their attendants. Cost-cutting and funds are low down on the list. The opposite is true for the authorities. Audrey's work is continually brilliant and invigorating, but the reason I specifically wanted to meet with her is because she is a key proponent of using art as a way of spreading her message. As well as an activist, Audrey is also an amazing cartoonist and has authored a number of works, including the amazingly titled 'Lint In Your Belly Button' (now translated into French, Chinese and Japanese). These humorous vignettes spell out thoughts and experiences of disability in a wonderfully charming book that fits in your pocket. The book originated from a monthly cartoon series Audrey did in a magazine called Rehabilitation Digest. The editor loved the idea of turning the cartoons into a book, so found a grant for a sabbatical and Audrey went away and drew and 'the more I drew, the freer I got' she says. The use of humour as a way of destabilising hierarchies and bursting the anxieties that can exist when new communities meet will certainly resonate with a British audience. While the jokes have to come from the right place if they are to bring people together, Audrey's book is much more inviting than a 600 page treatise on integration. It allows people in. Her next book, Audrey said, might be called 'Whoever said it was a bummer', the cover image being a guy in a wheelchair stuck in a sports stadium behind a sea of bums. Audrey is fond of using images and story to explain the history of disability. Her astronaut theory is much praised, for instance, because it is instantly relatable as a visual metaphor for all. Illustrating the kernel of the social model of disability, she asks who is more disabled than the astronaut? He's on life support! And yet, our instinct is that he's a 'normal' guy in an environment that doesn't meet his physical needs. Think, she says, if that might apply to anyone else. For Audrey, 'art is a better medium for you being just who you are between people'. Artistic people are looking for things that are different and original. The value isn't there, she says, societal conceptions are broken down. This notion of learning through art and story might well point us to the benefits of a disability museum space (see The Museum of disABILITY below). Audrey herself played a key role in Ryerson University's highly acclaimed Disability Out From Under exhibit, still a virtual museum at http://ryerson.ca/ofu/ The exhibit was set up by Catherine Frazee (who I mentioned previously in reference to her Pod Play).

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Catherine had the idea of teaching her history of disability class in a different way. Her students would bring in an artefact and create an installation around it. She then sent out an invitation to the community to see if anyone wanted to be involved alongside them. Audrey became involved in a beautiful installation called breathing, which can still be seen online. The exhibition eventually went to the Royal Ontario Museum. Interestingly, however, Rina Fraticelli told me that the exhibition was located for a time in the lobby of a university near an Ice Rink in Vancouver. A deliberate move. Tremendously popular with kids, the ice rink location meant that many who would have never seen the exhibition had the chance to learn about the history of people with disabilities, the legacy of the institutions, and the importance of what this might mean today. Personal stories that could have been lost for ever, found new life with new audiences. As well as visiting the Abilities Arts Festival, one of my main reasons for visiting Toronto was to find out more about the Open Gallery at OCAD University. It's a new space owned by the Inclusive Design Institute and run by the wonderful David Prerya. The intention is to create a participatory and fully accessible gallery centre through a program of events and activities. This open ideology, coupled with a real attention to detail in creating full access, was very inspiring. David invited me to experience the space by giving a short lecture to attendees of the Open Gallery, before questions and discussion. As well as discussing my background in disability issues, my talk discussed my current work and thoughts on the trip thus far. Here are a few bullet points: - At the L'Arche communities for people with and without disabilities to which I belonged, art and music proves very popular. They highlight peoples' talents and create great entertainment. They are also disciplines which place a value on original perspectives and approaches, and so can break down implicit hierarchies of ability. - Apart from these little pockets of inclusion, Britain has very few non-patronising entry points for meeting people from different communities. Katherine Quarmby's book Scapegoat makes this plain.

- So if we can agree that diversity is a good thing, perhaps art might be a good way to achieve this meeting point. It is open to varying modalities of expression and participation across barriers. - Britain is ready for this type of evolving spirit. The Paralympics changed disability from being understood as a negative spectacle to a positive spectacle. But people's interaction with disabilities is still at the point of spectacle. There seems little grass roots work to create friendships between people with and without disabilities. - This project isn't about supplanting liberating communities of people with disabilities meeting other people with disabilities. Spaces like The Deaf Culture Centre show the power of pride when communities carve out or take back their own cultures.

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- This project is about a need to create points of engagement for diverse peoples. And open spaces like this might be a way of creating such communities in the mould of real accessibility, with an invitation to all who wish to engage in such an ideology. After my talk, the attendees introduced themselves and told me a bit about themselves. Their interests and projects were fascinating and hugely varied. There were around 15 people attending in total, from Spirit, a visual artist and dancer researching community and integration, to Freddie, who helps run the Toronto Newsgirls Boxing Club, a gym for Women and Trans People which runs programs for individuals with physical disabilities in the community. Melissa, a disability activist who helps run the funding program at CILT, to Richard, an inclusive software designer. Together we had a lively and productive discussion. For the sake of brevity, I'll just pull out a couple of salient questions and responses. RICHARD: From your research how do you think we might make the change towards integrated cultural models? - Firstly, it does seem to be happening in cultural organisations that demand a high amount of skill and state an openness to diverse participants. Talent breaks through barriers because talented people like working with other talented people. It helps if there is an inspirational leader like Kitty Lunn or Ike Schamberlin leading from the front, also. As for organisations where people might meet for pleasure rather than achievement of high-art, this is a trickier proposition. Many of the organisations in this sphere seem to advocate some kind of therapeutic aim, rather than just pleasure, and so are aimed at one specific community's needs. Add to this potential prejudices, that the more 'disabled' you are the more you can't engage with pleasure or learning, and you are left with few examples of successful, accessible projects that engage with diverse audiences. One factor that`s vital to reverse this trend is a willingness to take a project and its audience seriously. Materials For The Arts' provision of professional art supplies is one way in which we can enhance a group's integrity by allowing everyone to feel serious about their participation and not as if they are some child at a Sunday School. Perhaps the answer lies here in OCAD'S Open Gallery.... David agrees, saying hopefully we can utilise the arts and culture sector to increase accessible and inclusive communities. They are looking at ways to animate the space here for that very reason – the space needs to be animated and to be used by the community, and the community needs a space where there can be social interaction that will lead to deeper relationships. Freddie adds that you have to be aware of breaking the connection. At the boxing gym, if people can't use public transport to get home than going to the gym feels like an inaccessible experience. It has to be convenient. - For me, integrated cultural models are also not necessarily about uniting people of similar bodily experiences. That's not my interest. Rather i`m interested in uniting people who are interested in the same thing. I'm wary of inorganic projects of special provision when someone has been invited to an activity group because of the community they are a part of, even if they have no interest in the activity whatsoever.

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I added finally that it's about curating contemporary and cool experiences, where it doesn't feel like people are gathering together as part of a bridge-building initiative but because they're involved in something exciting. DAVID: In Disability communities, even in just the Developmentally Disabled community, you find yourself in a myriad of identities, opinions and viewpoints. The language becomes very difficult and people want different things. How will you deal with that? - One way I think you can proceed is to be guided by the actual people who are in the community you are dealing with. It's also why you should always work with people who represent the communities you are seeking to work with, and not seek to represent anyone other than yourself. However, l think we can't be seduced by the idea that it is negative to learn the intricacies of multi-faceted communities. It should be a positive thing that people want to learn how and why people want to identify. The embarrassment and negativity, which comes from this fear is not constructive. FREDDIE: Where do you see that teaching take place? - That's the million dollar question. The Last Leg, a Channel Four comedy show covering the Paralympics, ran a twitter campaign called 'Is it OK?' Viewers could tweet in asking if it was OK to ask a certain question about disability. If their tweets were stupid, they'd rightly get ridiculed. Other questions were salient or interesting and the panel of comics (from both the disability and non-disability communities) would, along with the resident Paralympians, engage in the queries. It was a smart and sassy way of dealing with what you could call a grammatical ignorance. The Last Leg wrestled with the necessary diversity of individuals and communities and the confusion that does arise.

The balance is between enabling such forums and continuing the misplaced obsession with medicalised understandings of individuals. The Last Leg's campaign wasn't inviting out-dated shouts of 'what's wrong with him' but discussion on questions of etiquette and social situations. It is a reminder that a big concern of creating a group of people from the

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disability and non-disability community is that you can get people without disabilities coming for the wrong reasons - thinking they are doing a good deed or somehow going to help. It's about a strong ideology, I think, and making sure the people who come subscribe or engage with it in a way the group finds constructive. As part of my day at OCAD, I was given a fascinating tour of the Inclusive Design and Research Centre housed at the university. The IDRC is a real leader in its field, and it was a privilege that a presentation had been arranged especially for my visit. The IDRC's purview is "Design that is inclusive of the full range of human diversity with respect to ability, language, culture, gender, age and other forms of human difference" and they stick to that remit, inspirationally.   According to IDRC, the greater need for universally designed products, online access and the general demographic trends leading to populations ageing worldwide, all point to the necessity of inclusive design. To fulfil this mission, the centre conceives of, builds and repairs Assistive Technologies, applications and services, policy and legislation, developer guidance, and online tools. They don't see their work as specialised - the IDRC say good design is design for all. Indeed innovations that were originally intended to benefit people with disabilities, but ultimately provided wider benefit include: . The Telephone . Microphone . Loudspeaker . Speech Synthesis . Flatbed scanners . Television captioning "Accessibility and inclusion are rights to be protected but they are also Creative Catalysts for new ideas and better design and, economic drivers that make good business sense while leading to ubiquitous social benefits." The projects IDRC are currently working on are fascinating, from a Sign Language Web Portal called Signage where links are signed rather than reproduced in typed font, to Tekla, an assistive technology which enables bluetooth signals to travel from mobile phones to wheelchairs, allowing wheelchair users, including those with a single puff switch, to access app or internet functions on an onscreen keyboard. Particularly interesting for me was the world of personalised accessibility, which allows individuals to personalise system interfaces to their custom preferences. The idea is to develop your preferences up in the cloud, so that wherever you go and identify yourself to a system (for buying tickets say, or listening to an album in a record store) it will load your preferences. The font size, voice output, backlight colours and so on will all change to accommodate your needs and wants. Sensing your presence through a mobile device, perhaps, or tablet the system will be discreet. It will also break down the need for labels, and with it the medical model. You won't need to request special attention because you are 'low vision' say, or indeed have someone infer you are 'disabled' after requesting certain options. Instead the interface will know your preferences, and in doing so have an inbuilt respect for diversity. - Philosophically, as well as practically, there are real implications here for British Life. When systems understand themselves as normative - the only way - they quickly become

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disabling. However, If we see them as customisable, disability no longer becomes 'a problem' but part of the diversity of human experience. The example here of course is in the world of computer functions, but the same goes for any kind of engagement with a diverse audience. Customising activities enables the diversity of human experience to flourish. OCAD had given me a lot to think about, and a sense of real community. In fact my very next meeting had been suggested by Spirit, who I met at the Open Gallery. Kerry Segal has run a weekly dance class for children with developmental disabilities for the last three years. She also helps facilitate an art and music class for inpatients at the Bloor View Rehabilitation Centre, where children are either in stages of recovery or in the process of surgery, as well as helping out at Spiral Garden, a dance camp for kids with and without developmental disabilities. Though she is keen to distinguish her classes from a therapeutic model (it's not about provable outcomes), she - like Kitty Lunn - is keen on the idea of learning. Kerry, who has an arts background, considers the class a conservatory. In her dance class, the participants work with a musician to learn stretches and warmups and body conditioning to loosen the body. But she relates these to her art, not medical therapy - "if you're not relaxed your body doesn't vibrate and you can't express yourself," she says. I found this distinction instructive. By delineating artistic conditioning from medical therapy, you enable the class and the artist participant to be seen as such, rather than as a medical subject. In both her music and her dance classes, Kerry uses the technique of patterning as a technique of learning. A movement, or note, will be set by one of the members of the class, and other members will be asked to follow and make new connections. It teaches the importance of making connections with each other, and gives an experience of leadership as well as following others. Kerry says she is continually improvising, for she wants to find people's special-skills and also unlock what people find frustrating. Some may find words frustrating, while others may find body-movement difficult. Learning peoples limits, as well as teaching them the importance of connection, is vital. As well as this focus on learning, Kerry is keen to say that ultimately the point of the class is fun. It's to feel good together, and to feel like it's a place you can run around in, if that's what you want. Behind this is a concrete ideology. "Special needs kids are always conditioned about their behaviour" Kerry says. Here, in her class, she wants her kids to feel like they are controlling or initiating the movement. It's a freedom to take control, to feel free, and also to be without your parents. For unlike teenagers without developmental disabilities, her class will be around their parents more often than is usual for other 15-18 year olds. So the space is there for everyone to participate, and also to have that bit of independence. Commonly, Kerry translates the individual movement that each person presents to the class, and makes it into an exercise. Nurturing a balance between learning and her classes' creative-freedom, she will integrate a curriculum with what the individual first leads with. This fluidity means that different needs are no obstacle to her class, she welcomes all. Plus, Kerry enjoys those who present her with a challenge. The experience of movement is universally beneficial to all attitudes and aptitudes, she says. Kerry's work at Spiral Garden does stretch to people with and without developmental difficulties, usually kids with developmental difficulties and their siblings. She is new to this

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set-up, however, her main experience being with her dance and music classes in Toronto. I think they are exemplary, for one they allow a model which welcomes leadership from individuals with developmental disabilities. Treating people as artists not as individuals with non-normative medical histories enables a class atmosphere where individuals of all background can take pleasure from artistic expression. Music Director John Jowett and his partners Cath and Salina created Keys To The Studio to encourage original music from people diagnosed with developmental and intellectual difficulties, as well as collaborations with full-time musicians. Visiting it was one of the real highlights of my trip. Here music becomes a connections for diverse people, and people with disabilities become leaders of their own artistic practice. It's a model which is progressive and profound and gives us a unique paradigm of artistic practice and integration to use in Britain. John had worked as a musician in disability services for many years. Around a decade ago, volunteering at a Montreal Children's Hospital as a piano teacher, he heard a child playing piano to himself with an amazing and unconventional technique. He went over to tell him how cool it sounded, but was met with embarrassment. The child told Jon that this was how he used to play before he had music lessons. "That's when I realised that this guy doesn't need European standard training, he needs to improvise. " Like a number of kids at the school, the musician had physical disabilities as well as intellectual and psychological difficulties - it helped John realise that people with disabilities could really benefit from this approach. Keys To The Studio is based on the idea of nurturing individual creativity. It focuses on the kind of creativity that can only come from 'you!'. Music isn't a competition, says John, it's about doing your thing, and enjoying achieving that. He wanted to create this project because he felt the institutional settings he'd been working in didn't respect the artistic capabilities and unique perspectives of their members. Staff, he says, were prone to saying 'that's not appropriate'. It's a phrase he hates. John tells me that a final straw was when one of his old pupils played this amazing song called 'Stink' was soon shut down by his college's staff. "I'd work with someone for half an hour and then they would go back to their group with a supervisor who would tell them to be quiet." In Keys To The Studio, he created a program in which people with disabilities are respected as equals. Cath tells me 'respect is the key. That's number one'. Everyone is treated with respect, and what has organically developed is an atmosphere of no rules. People feel safe because they help dictate the atmosphere of the project. It's still a very professional environment, techniques are taught on state of the art kit - sequencers, turntables, drums, a sound beam, guitars and so on - but it is an atmosphere which is genuinely collaborative. The way the project works reflect John and Cath's key values of respect, opportunity, collaboration and free music making. Fundamentally, all participants get an hour of one to one music-making with a professional musician each week. The sessions can go whatever way the project member wishes to take them - if they wish to take lessons on classical harp they can, if they wish to jam and scream their lungs out, they can... What it means is that, at its very core, marginalised people are offered opportunities they might not otherwise have had. It also means that for once, people with learning disabilities don't have to follow a creative strategy, they can lead it. Intriguingly, Jon says this is what draws the professional musicians back as well. Different perspectives and music styles led by

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members hone the professional's improv skills and widens their perspectives to new and radical techniques. John and Cath's interest in fluidity and inclusion meant that when people organically began to drop in on others' sessions, jams and bands were encouraged to form and rehearse in the same community space. It's a real open door policy, and they run jams where anyone can drop in. What this means is that as well as professional musicians, security guards, police officers, market workers, whoever you are, can all come down and play. "All of a sudden people are playing with people with intellectual difficulties. There's a sudden shift in their perception, most of them have never met a person with disabilities before. It's a real leveller". There are performances too - the wider public get the chance to hear the amazing music that's being produced. Every 12 weeks there's a concert where all members get to perform their own music. Increasingly, the musicians are also playing around town too, at parties for people with disabilities or in bars they have links with. This enables a sense of pride and the achievement you get from performance, as well as allowing the audience to be part of the experience. Again, John is keen to stress that there are no restrictions. If people want to improvise their pieces for a long time, that's up to them. A cabaret style system means the audience can go out and come back in if they need refreshments, without disrupting the atmosphere. I was incredibly impressed by Keys To The Studio. It's aimed at people aged 18 and over because it understands there is little to no artistic service for people with disabilities once they leave college, and it treats those people like adults. Not just that, it understands that its members are artists who know more than they do about disability art and music. As such, John and Cath told me that their aim is to have their members with learning difficulties make up the board of the project, deciding the direction and focus of its activity. They are committed to a vision of people with developmental disabilities leading and becoming recognised as experts. Through music, Keys To The Studio creates a non-patronising entry point to friendships that otherwise wouldn't exist, along with a number of brilliant tunes. It is quite remarkable. Toronto had already given me a wealth of thinking to do. I'd met great people, seen great projects and felt inspired by the inclusive atmosphere. Keys To The Studio had given me a sense of what was possible, but I was still intrigued by connections between those who understood themselves as from the disability community and those who understood themselves as not. How could a project enabling these connections through art protect itself from attracting the wrong people? Could you filter out those who had come for misplaced motives? For a sense of charity, perhaps. Indeed should you filter them out? Aren't these the sort of attitudes integration is there to challenge and change? For Rose Jacobson, head of Picasso Pro, allies to the disability community and to the work of artists with disability are not only vital, they should also be appraised through meetings at social events and existing friends in common. It was one of a number of startlingly wise insights Rose would give me during our interview. As I write, it is a pleasure to think of my meeting there, as fruitful and rich as it was. Picasso Pro is an evolving entity that has existed, and no doubt will exist, in a variety of different forms - it is people-led. The work that goes on there is mostly integrated arts. It doesn't claim to represent people with disabilities. It's an inclusive arts forum, a not-for-

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profit collective who find grants for people to create practice both in the community and individually. I was lucky enough to meet with both Rose and Melissa Webster, a member of Picasso Pro - a dancer, choreographer, and expressive arts therapist. They met through a mutual acquaintance who introduced them around an advocacy issue. When Melissa was obstructed from entering a theatre she had headed to - no wheelchair-accessible alternative to the hundreds of steps had been introduced - she and Rose created a political performance-piece, with Melissa's body being dragged back and forth up and down the stairs. It was a creative and contemporary way of engaging with the issue. Creative and contemporary are words that could be used to describe the performances that are put on under the Picasso Pro banner, but centrally it is about work in progress. A much overlooked aspect of art in the disability community, says Rose, is that people don't have a place to create their work in an accessible environment. While festivals allow interaction with completed work, people need space to find their vocabulary and achieve their process, as well as the finished article. Rose doesn't mind if Picasso Pro doesn't exist in five years time, as long as artistic practice is developing. In fact the organisation has evolved through a number of different guises since 1993 when Rose created DIS THIS, a sub-set of services for artists within disability and Deaf services. While the work is still very much centred on art-driven practice for people who aspire or are already emergent artists, Rose is open to including other cultural communities, not only disability and Deaf cultures. The litmus test is that everybody who comes along must be in the circle of engagement, they must know one person already, because what's key, she says, is to be involved in the right ethic or motive. Melissa adds that people have to be engaged in the notion of disability culture if they are working at Picasso Pro in any capacity. "That nuanced connection to disability" - even if you are an able-bodied attendee - "will foster a sense of how 'we' might work together". It's a topic that fascinates me, so I ask Rose to elaborate. "Being an ally is about having an infinity to the culture you are supporting", and one way to test this is at social events, because it's about trust, rather than definitions of who is or isn't abled. Picasso Pro runs Bring Your Own Bottle Plus Buddy. Here people are invited to join existing friends who are members in the space for an informal chat and a screening perhaps. It's a non-binding arrangement, and a way of meeting new people. Picasso Pro is 60 per cent invited participants, and 40 per cent open call. Rose is very positive about this. She talks warmly of brilliant people she has met simply through others saying 'you need to meet my friend'. They allow connections to be made through an awareness that existing members of the community will bring great people into your life. It also works both ways. If she has little in common with a person, or their philosophy of disability isn't shared, it doesn't matter which community they are a part of, they don't have a place at Picasso. A right ethic comes first. What this doesn't mean is a uniform collection of people. In fact it's the opposite. Rose invites people of widely divergent beings and artistic inclinations, looking for grants for them as well as more general ways to further their career. For her, 'paradox not ideology is what interests', the creative spark that comes from varying practices and individuals working in a similar space, sometimes collaborating, sometimes working on their own. Rose is the central uniting element of Picasso Pro - she is a programmer and producer. Currently she is trying to secure a grant for three pairs of artists to create work for the

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camera. But she won't create the work. It is their focus. This is an example of what I had seen before, an impressive figure head leading an integrated practice for seekers of good work. For Rose, Picasso Pro flourishes because it walks a fine line. It is professional - renumeration for participating artists is key. But it also about breaking down notions of expertise. While specialists are welcome, as everyone is hungry to acquire expertise (the success of regular workshops attest to the fact) no one leads art, they are all participating artists of equal stature. Picasso Pro, like Keys To The Studio, had shown me a fluid yet keenly focussed model of artistic connections for diverse people. Here, the work is for emergent artists, rather than those who are interested in art for mere pleasure alone, but the notion of connection through an 'alliance', as well as the art itself, is hugely instructive. Rose and Melissa's final thought was that to create such a project on British soil, the key - fundamentally - is to have an address. If your philosophy is inclusive, and a space is too, any thorns of practice or people can be countered head on. With these fundamentals you have a great shot. The Deaf Culture Centre is an exciting space in the heart of an exciting area in Toronto. The distillery district where it resides is a re-developed group of buildings, once part of a huge distillery, now home to many organisations who work in the arts and culture sector. It is a fitting home for this space, dedicated uniquely to a celebration of Deaf life and Deaf culture. The directors of the centre, Joanne Crips and Anita Small, told me it is the only one of its kind in the world. It is not connected to service provision, it is a forum purely dedicated to Deaf people to show their skills, their arts and contributions, their language and their culture. It's about pride. 'The difference between Deafness and Deafhood' (Anita Small). Set up in 2006, everything about the Deaf Cultural Centre embodies its message. It is beautifully designed so that the entire building resonates as something that is Deaf. The door handles are emblematic of sigh language, echoing the movements for the words sign and inspire, while white marble is used inside the centre because Ontario's schools for the Deaf have white marble on their floors. It's a space where the Deaf community are fully in charge of meaning, a liberation from meanings that have been imposed upon them. Inside the space there is a gallery as well as a museum area and a number of resources for people to peruse. Clearly a sense of history is vital, as there are a number of artefacts and information boards set out on early pioneers of the Canadian community. Fundamentally, however, the center is a very contemporary space. Their main gallery changes exhibit every six months. Joanne told me they've had every sort of Deaf artist exhibited here, as well as Deaf inventors, Deaf film-makers and more. Currently there is a beautiful exhibition of De'Via art (the term coined by a group of Deaf artists in 1989 to describe the use of formal art to express the innate culture of physical Deaf experience) by an Iranian artist. The exhibition traces her work's journey. Her earlier paintings use dark colours and do not focus on facial features, but then at the point in her life when she found an inclusive community and so her work changes also - to vibrant, contrasting colours with thematic emphasis on the face (characteristics of De'Via work).

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Joan and Anita told me that contemporary experience was very important for the Deaf culture centre, as Deaf people have great stories to tell. Instead of being pushed aside, 'we want to tell them' (Joanne Crips). Their challenge is how to inform people about these stories without encouraging pity, but rather a strong message about liberation and oppression. People should recognise Audism, Joanne says, but also see liberation - stories of liberation and strength. In terms of engaging the non-Deaf community in this message, the Deaf Culture Center's Nuit Blanche events have continually brought huge crowds through the doors. This year featured a night of wonderful dance and poetry (including the acclaimed poet and ASL pioneer Ella Mae). They also send a signing Santa Clause into the heart of the Distillery District each year so that all kids can gain an awareness of the positivity of the culture of signing and what it means to people. What I will take away from the Deaf Culture Centre however, is the vitality of a message of integration coexisting alongside the creation of positive spaces for Deaf and Disabled communities to strengthen their own cultures. The Deaf Culture Centre breaks out of the medical model by its singular purpose of promoting the culture of its community. This is vital. Indeed Joanne told me about a young Deaf child who had never met Deaf adults before, having been born into a hearing family and placed in a mainstream school. He was shocked and amazed, coming here, that there were people like him who had the potential to do such amazing artistic things.

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Before I headed to Seattle, I made a final stop-off at The Museum Of disABILITY (sic) in Buffalo. Buffalo is technically in New York though confusingly much closer to Toronto, so it made sense to do it this way around. It is also the home to the only bricks and mortar Disability Museum in the world.

The museum was founded by a non-profit called People Incorporated in 1998 after James Boles, President and CEO of People Inc. discovered there was no museum or single education resource to send students to learn about the history of people with disabilities. Existing for a number of years in the offices of their parent company, they have, since 2010, operated out of their sizeable current site in Buffalo with the intention, says Doug Platt the head curator, of bringing the history of disability to a wider audience. After Boles had identified the need for a museum, he and Platt started collecting books, articles and materials to do with the history of disability: 'often on eBay' says Platt. Every year they would design a new exhibition with a new theme and artefacts and as time went on they had enough information to span the years, so they created a chronological display from the substance of the separate exhibitions. The result is a beautiful museum filled with intriguing curios, simple interactive displays and informative text-boards or banners. Concentrating on European and American histories, the displays chart the European roots of care for people with disabilities, humane care, the adaptation of poorhouses, through to modern-day living and people with disabilities in entertainment. They also touch upon social reformers like Dorothy Dix, early education institutions for people with intellectual difficulties and different adaptive equipment through the ages. Particularly striking is their Thundersly Invacar, one of the few surviving models of the car that was developed in the post-war years in Britain for disabled drivers. The museum is expanding too. They create exhibits as often as they can, debuting them in the museum for six or seven months before putting them into rotation as a touring exhibit.

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This is a vital part of the Museum's remit. They send out exhibits to other organisations and clubs to spread the message as often as possible - as Platt says 'it also adds a sense of well vetted history to an organisation'. These travelling exhibits are easily mailable, often comprising of text-banners you can fold up and send out like a camping tent. For Platt, the Museum is an accessible space that highlights the journey of a segment of society who slowly became realised as active citizens - an evolving understanding that society puts barriers in the way of people with disabling conditions from participating in public life. However, he is also clear that the Museum of disABILITY is not a critique on the reformers of the past. "You could look back and say oh my god this is all so horrible, even with the language, how could we treat people like this. Well people were doing what they thought was best at the time, and people will look back at us and stay the same." There is no triumphalism of the present. If anything, the fact that there is no other museum of disability in the world supports Platt's stance. Platt has received visitors from educators, post-polio groups, social workers, college students and groups of individuals with intellectual disabilities. There is clearly huge potential here for a point of engagement between different communities and diverse individuals. The museum, as a general entity, is a place where people take themselves to learn the history of a specific topic. It's a space for an organic engagement with the vital histories of a marginalised people. It is quite remarkable that the only Museum of Disability is in Buffalo, New York. Seattle The first appointment I'd made in Seattle was to observe a Yoga class offered by Seattle's Parks and Recreation Department. It was one of a wide variety of on-going programs, socials and camps that the Department offers for disabled youth and adults. Tim Pretare, the Recreation and Specialised Programs Manager for the department, told me that these programs are pitched at different ages. For instance, while swimming and softball are popular activities for children, hiking and cooking are particular favourites with older individuals. For the later age group, there is a focus on teaching and learning skills to enable individuals to live successful and independent lives while for the former it is more about simply providing pleasurable experiences. As a Parks and Recreation centre, they want to offer recreation for all, though Tim was clear that some individuals do experience the classes as therapeutic, even if that's not necessarily the intended outcome. The department's programs are primarily designed for individuals with development and learning difficulties, but they are looking to spread their provision to individuals with physical disabilities too. For this reason they had just twinned with a wheelchair basketball group, so as to offer them support and facilities. I wanted to observe one of their classes, for the Seattle Park and Recreation Department's programs offered a governmental model the likes of which I had not yet come across on my trip. All programs offered are free for participants, funded by tax dollars, and I was inclined to see how that modality was expressed practically. The class I saw was professional and very well led. Four kids, diverse in personality and physical ability, were clearly enjoying the calming moves of Yoga, taught to them by a professional teacher in professional surroundings (the community centre was stocked with good equipment). Another assistant was on hand to enable the kids to perform the stretches being taught, the atmosphere was educational as well as relaxing. People were enjoying themselves, and their was a sense of communality amongst the boys.

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Tim told me, after class, that there are also versions of the programs for individuals who are non-verbal, indeed the department's remit is to include everyone. This extends to facilitating individuals who would prefer to be involved in the programs they offer for people without 'special needs'. Though this can be difficult, Tim said, it was no downside, rather it was one of the reasons why he enjoyed being part of a governmental department. It commands inclusive work. The programs that the department offers for disabled adults and youth are of great value. Though they don't necessarily create the meeting point that I think would be socially worthwhile, they do offer opportunities for pleasure and learning to all who wish to participate. Tim's willingness to include individuals in programs that hadn't been designed for people with disabilities is also inspiring. There is even a specific committee - the race and social justice committee - whose job it is to review such cases of inclusion. These efforts to structurally enshrine accessibility and inclusion in Seattle indicate that government activity is certainly part of the puzzle of a fully integrated society. They create a standard for inclusive practice, and while society must work hard to fill in the sizeable gaps that can't be covered by governmental provision, the upkeep of free artistic and sporting services for individuals is - from the evidence of the thousands participating in Tim's programs every year - clearly of huge benefit for the social engagement of marginalised people, especially in the midst of a deep recession. Seattle is a city renowned for its coffee, so it was a double pleasure to sit down to an illuminating conversation with Patt Copeland over a delicious spiced latte. Patt is a remarkable figure, she runs a program called Vision Loss Connections and sits on The Seattle Commission For People With Disability. She's endlessly fascinating on both. Patt's main focus for many years has been Vision Loss Connections. It's an organisation of people who are blind and low vision who live in the Seattle Area. According to their website, they exist to address the unmet needs of the visually impaired community by organising groups in the areas of: - Arts & Culture - Sports & Recreation - Support & Education Interestingly, their website also notes: 'We strongly encourage the involvement of family and friends in all our activities'. It's testament to something that is central to Vision Loss Connections, that they exist to facilitate connections not necessarily because their members share a similar experience of disability, but because people in that community share the same interests. Of course it is, as it says on the tin, about accessibility for people who are low vision or blind, but there is a distinction to be made. It's about building bridges of accessibility that don't exist, and the best way to do that is to make sure the right people get access to the right bridge. That is to say, people are connected through the experiences they enjoy, but also through the way they can show organisations those experiences could, and should, be made accessible for them. I was quite struck by this idea, which weaves a fine line between community engagement for its own ideological merit, as The Deaf Cultural Centre, and something purely practical. Patt added some historical context to illuminate the nuance. She said there used to be a

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blind centre, and lots of people enjoyed it, but others found it very patronising - "they didn't want to be lumped together with other blind people". However, "then it went the other way to total mainstreaming in the States and people felt they lost something." It is a vital history to learn. In America, as in Britain, there was a sense that a disenfranchised group could gain power by organising themselves into a group, Patt says, but in some areas of the disability community not everyone wanted to be grouped together in that way. There were also, within Patt's own community, distinctions within the group - being born blind, losing vision and so on. - The lesson for British practice is that any attempt at engagement at a community level should not subsume the individual perspectives within those communities. - Another lesson for accessibility and integration, says Patt, is that it's a two way street. The communities who wish to engage with accessible services must make sure their members actually use them. If accessible services don't get used, organisations' understandings of them suffer. Vision loss connections realise that part of this gap in accessibility in cultural institutions stems from the fact that marginalised people often have limited resources, and if no one is there to experience accessible services, organisations may cut them. One of the key initiatives of the Vision Loss Connections is in countering this potentiality. One of the main programs they run is theatre audio description. To gather folk and make this a viable option, they organise a group discount and subsidise tickets to the theatre once a month. A lunch beforehand makes it an inviting option. The theatre knows they can employ an audio describer for a number of people who will benefit from the service, and so they are willing to bear the expense. For Patt, part of the lesson to be learned is making good contacts with organisations. Indeed as well as theatre audio description, Vision Loss Connections run a tactile art session at The Seattle Art Museum once a month. Originally it was a verbal description tour that started in the sculpture garden, and in its five years of existence, has now moved on to incorporate special exhibitions. Art making has proved particularly popular with the group. Once more, it is testament that the connection here is fundamentally an interest in art, with the session moulded towards the accessibility of people with visual impairments. The connection has meant that sighted family and friends come along too. A community of people who gain access from the tactile tours is a given, and those who feel the same connection to art are welcome as well. Patt supports those who who don't want to have to participate in a group tour. I want all museums to be accessible at any time, she says. Practically, however, to get beyond access theory, you need people present in the space for people to start realising how real the need is. Her advice is for advocates to get out there, and get things started. Disability shouldn't be about insiders and outsiders. There are connections between all of us. Patt's relationship with Vision Loss Connections has existed for many years. Newly, she is also involved with Seattle's Commission For Disabilities (itself relatively young). The idea was to create a forum for people with disabilities to bring issues before an official setting. The commission has also begun to organise community events and cultural gatherings, so I was interested in its purview. Patt had helped organise The Seattle Sounders - the city's popular Soccer team - to come and raise public awareness for a Goal Ball display (Goal Ball being a Paralympic sport played predominantly by people with vision loss). For my purposes, I was as interested in this as much as the commission itself. Strategically, it's a clever move. The notion of raising public awareness for disability causes should not be

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thrown out with the dirty bath water the charity model. Creating a space for people with disabilities to tell their narratives to others requires bridges that will connect to the non-disability community, and popular teams and artists are a clever way to do this. One of my central motivations in visiting Seattle had been to give a talk at the UCEDD (University Centre For Excellence In Developmental Disabilities) at the CHDD (Centre on Human Developmental Disability) at the University of Washington. I had been touch with Sharan Brown, the Associate Director at the department, and was delighted to have the opportunity to discuss my thoughts about inclusion and identity with her and her students. It was an absolutely engaging conversation, and much came from it. Self-reference amongst the disability community had been a frequent topic of my meetings in America. And Sharan began by telling me an interesting case at a national forum for self-advocacy groups, which the UCEDD hosted, where an advocacy group were fighting the term 'self-advocates'. To them this term had become stigmatic for people with intellectual disabilities. Why were they ‘self-advocates’? They were just advocates like everyone else. The commission for the administration of Developmental Disability, however, said that getting rid of that term would be to give up valuable attention to their rights and needs. The debate is one of many illustrations of the complexity of the issue. When to give up a term that has political advantage, but inherent stigma? As important, we agreed, was that this complexity was not seen as a bad thing in itself. Identity politics are so often approached with a sphere of negativity, that a gap between people who feel equipped to discuss it and those who don't can easily develop. It creates a vicious circle, an individual's expressed identity is lost on so much of society. While in contemporary Britain, the majority community have so much to learn about the barriers placed on the minority community. Those points of education won’t exist if positive opportunities aren’t created. My instinct was that those opportunities could be created within the developmental disability community by a reinvigorated focus on leadership opportunities. Keys To The Studio had shown me a model where artists with intellectual disabilities could lead a creative forum, rather than just follow. Sharan said that there was still a gap though, and that was confidence. Once more she used the example of the forum for self-advocacy groups held at the UCEDD. One of the institutional responses to the forum was to create a few pots of $5,000 for certain self-advocates to apply for, to enable their advocacy. Sharan's experience was that her advocates, though they wanted to further their independence, didn't feel confident enough to apply. They had, what she called, a learned helplessness. They had been cultured to receive, but not to lead. How you address this is no easy question. For Sharan the age old debate between whether inclusion should be forced through governmental policy, or fostered at grassroots level is in someways redundant. In America she said, they have tried top-down policies of inclusion - integrative schooling, a state job - and yet this sense of learned powerlessness amongst the developmental disability community remains. A glimpse at a different kind of answer comes from the state of Georgia. The state Developmental Disability Council executive director appraised the projects state money were funding each year, and saw they weren't really making any progress. They weren't

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augmenting inclusion, jobs, happiness. So they changed their strategy, Sharan told me. They started to spend money on finding the change-makers in local communities. These individuals articulated a vision not of segregated projects, but of services that communities actually needed. And this enabled a vision of community development in new services, which had at their heart a strong engagement with people with Developmental Disabilities. A farmer's market proved particularly popular, and allowed various people to exhibit their skills as gardeners and farmers as well as servers. It's to suggest that segregated non-profits might be less inclusive as a strategy that saying; what does a community need, we'll help you set it up if you remain conscious of how best to be inclusive. It's fundamentally the Universal Design model. This is a fascinating development, which I think may be part of the solution to creating integrative spaces. Sharan and I agreed that this is only a part, however. Structural issues must be addressed. So must the notion of tokenism, where individuals see minority inclusion in institutions simply as a response to a particular mandate. Sharan hopes that the D Center at the University of Washington might help address both. The D Center, newly opened, describes its mission as 'striving to create an inclusive, accessible space affirming of all bodies, minds and identities by fostering a culture of social justice and pride.' It's a space to meet and discuss issues of Deaf and Disability pride as well as a hub for events, programming and community. It's also a symbolic openness to a campus society that fosters full accessibility, inclusively and leadership opportunities for members of minority communities. The class are rightfully excited about this development on campus. They were equally receptive to the idea of using art as a way of engaging very different people with each other as individuals. As Anjolie, one of the graduate students put it, art gives you a sense of freedom and individuality. What the discussion led me to realise, was that a service in which the community truly benefit will automatically bring people to its fold. As well as visiting the UCHDD, it was also a real pleasure to visit L'Arche Seattle and make the connection with Mary Brown, a support coordinator who was once part of the community in Lambeth in South London where I was also a member. I was keen to visit L'Arche Seattle because I had heard of the fantastic art of Robert Ross, a core member of the community, and wanted to meet with him and see his work. Both Mary and Robert live in Shinutoa house in Capitol Hill, close to where I was staying, so I popped in for tea. Together with Caroline, another core member of Shinutoa house, we all played the board game 'sorry' over Earl Gray until I inevitably lost. They gave me a tour of their home, which houses an activity centre in the basement. Here, members of L'Arche Seattle make candles and cards in the day, which are sold through church fairs. It is a model that will be familiar to people in L'Arche communities throughout the world. The creation of scented candles and calendars from recycled materials is a model which allows the community a sense of purpose and a way to engage with new visitors who might buy the products and learn the message of L'Arche. This sense of art as purpose and work is very much exemplified by Robert himself. Robert works at Seattle Pottery Supply. In his spare time he loves to make ships, or arks, of varying sizes and details. They are consistently beautiful, often with many layers and animal visitors. They are technically incredibly proficient, one is even as big as a room.

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L'Arche enables him to achieve this work. As a supportive network it engages him an artist and seeks to enable his skills as much as possible.

As part of my trip to Seattle I also wanted to seek out unconventional connections between art and disability that I hadn't perhaps discovered until this point. Art With Heart fit the bill perfectly. It's a unique non for profit, set up in 1996, with a mission to empower youth in crisis through therapeutic books and programs that foster self-expression in hospital settings. I was lucky enough to meet with Nancy Stilliger who has been program director at Art With Heart for two years, and she introduced me to the books that the project has created. Each is a collaboration between amazing artists and child life specialists, the latter of whom work to create exercises and experiences that can aid kids in difficult experiences, and make them feel less isolated. The art is very cool, and vitally, pitched at distinct age-brackets, so never feel patronising. Currently, the books they offer are: - INK ABOUT IT A therapeutic activity book designed to help struggling teens and ‘tweens adapt and adjust to life’s ups and downs. - CHILL AND SPILL A guided journal designed to reduce symptoms of trauma, build resilience and coping skills and promote good decision-making techniques. - MAGNIFICENT MARVELLOUS ME! A book to help meet the emotional needs of elementary aged children who are facing family challenges – ranging from divorce to a serious illness or disability. - OODLES OF DOODLES

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An activity book that offers children (ages 6-16) therapeutic distraction from hospital settings and a meaningful way to express their fears and concerns. I found the work particularly interesting because it looks at art and social integration from a different angle. For marginalised people with associative mental health issues, participation in group artistic settings isn't necessarily conducive to feeling of inclusion or community. But art, and creative self-expression, can still have beneficial consequences as an individual pursuit, enabling individuals to feel more involved in society, and with themselves. Therapeutically, in this case, art is the coping mechanism that allows you to feel the first steps to becoming part of society. There are possible social dimensions to this therapeutic model as well. Nancy told me, for instance, that the books are often taken into school settings for group-work. In mental health sessions too, kids with varying backgrounds have come together to think about the art exercises jointly. Creating alongside each other in this case allows valuable bonds to form across boundaries. Art With Heart doesn't just create books. It also offers curricular and onsite space for follow-up art-making, and training to therapists who wish to adapt the books for different audiences. The focus, says Nancy, is a fundamental belief in the inherent pleasure of making art. 'Art is a coping mechanism, no matter what your circumstances are.' It was a real pleasure to speak to Nancy, and learn from her work. She was also kind enough to put me in touch with Andrea Parsek and her assistant Kelly Lissak who run the art provision at Provail, a non-profit multi-service organisation which exists to aid people with Cerebral Palsy. Its existed since 1942, and currently has a couple of hundred employees in many different sectors, from the technology centre to the community living program, employment services to a dental clinic. There's even a club house for individuals who've had traumatic brain injuries. The art provision started two years ago. Provail run monthly workshops for people who are already under the umbrella of the organisation, plus anyone who has seen the class online and wishes to participate. It's a class specifically for artists with disabilities, typically with one volunteer per artist. The terminology of artist, says Andrea, is vital. 'It's the goal'. In this setting, she says, it helps people to define themselves, to feel supported, and to realise their abilities. Definitions are always a struggle, client is used in some settings, participators in another - here you are an artist. Both Andrea and Kelly have backgrounds in art and feel keen on introducing some elements of artistic theme and practitioners to the class. Ultimately, however, their use of the word artist reflects the creative space they allow the members of the session to achieve self-expression. Rather than therapy, this is about the group's artistic energy inspiring each other in a moment of freedom. The set up is that 'you have free reign for two hours and you can do whatever you want to do and here are the supplies to go and make it happen' (Andrea). Again, diversity feeds the artistic practice. Kelly and Andrea tell me many very different people attend. Some are ambulatory, some use wheelchairs, others have no dexterity in their hands; there are folks with hearing difficulties, one artist paints with his foot. The energy of so many different perspectives, says Andrea, feeds off itself. It means that each is fascinated by the other's work, because it comes from such a different point of view. Indeed, delightfully, Andrea and Kelly are fascinated too and take real pleasure in showing

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me some of the work they have in their office. It is fascinating stuff. Primarily in paint, sometimes with glitter, on acrylic or canvas, either abstract or on a certain theme. There is no doubt that what the sessions do is allow people to pursue an avenue that they couldn't have pursued without these classes. For some, it has become their raison d'etre. Andrea and Kelly think that the class works because of the intimacy of the sessions - there are around 10 or so artists at each monthly class - and because of the diversity of perspectives and ages of those who show up (the artists span the age brackets from teens to pensioners). I think it's also due to the expertise of Andrea and Kelly and the other volunteers. The environment they create is both free, most attendees come without care attendants or family, but also safe, volunteers on-hand know the individuals' interests (and can develop richer curricula to suit) as well as any needs they should be preferred for. Provail have held a handful of shows in the community to illustrate the work of disabled artists to a wider public, as well as their family and friends. Once a year they put on a big fundraiser with around 100 pieces of art on show, as well as videos of the class in action, and food and wine to make the atmosphere hospitable. Andrea's goal for the future is to create more community work like this, but out in the open, creating real awareness of the talents and perspectives of the people who come and paint to a wider audience. Jack Straw Productions and Studios is a unique non-profit, which exists to promote all forms of audio art by providing opportunities, programmes and fellowships for writers, actors, musicians and minority communities. Its recording studios, engineers and sound equipment are given for hire or pro bono to enable individuals and communities to translate their ideas into recorded stories, accounts or messages for the wider world. Joan Rabinowitz, the director of Jack Straw, told me the organisation had just reached its fiftieth anniversary. It began in 1962 as community radio station, named after Jack Straw – a British revolutionary who fought tirelessly for peasants' rights. Battling for the rights of minority communities was part of the radio station’s philosophy from the very first. Indeed its programs were deliberately positioned to give communities a voice they otherwise wouldn’t have had. Immigrants, refugees, non-English speakers, young people; these were the types of individuals who took to the air under the banner of Jack Straw. The first twenty-five years of the organisation were given over to this kind of radio work. They even made links with the ethno-musicology department at the University of Washington, and broadened scope. Moving into their current location, around 1992, however, they wanted to use these early principles of practice – giving communities a voice, community work – in an environment, which wasn’t tied to broadcasting. Although they still work with many radio stations, the main core of what Jack Straw does now is encapsulated by three arts-based residency programs. Beginning with their Artist Support Program in 1993, they now offer free use of the studio plus support (engineers, vocal coaches and so on) to new writers (1997) and gallery space to new-media artists (1999). They provide their fellows with a number of connections and presentation possibilities too (podcasts, artist talks, public events etc). In return for these benefits Joan asks her fellows to give time and advice to projects from local communities. Joan’s philosophy is to maintain links with as many communities as possible that will benefit from the studios, and to provide as few barriers – economic, or time-wise – as she can. Her attitude is quite inspiring. She seeks inclusion. Sometimes a

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school group will come to Jack Straw with a project, other times she will take projects to communities she thinks aren’t being represented at the studio. Joan says she is excited equally by new ideas and community inclusion, but centrally her work is about the preservation of stories. It’s a focus that speaks to me very much. I know that it can be hard to get people to listen to the stories of people with intellectual disabilities, and indeed those stories might be hard to listen to. The history of institutions and eugenics do not make for easy listening. But they are vital. And this is something Joan understands. Much of her work with schools, which is free of charge incidentally, centres around asking kids to talk about a holiday they celebrate with their parents and record it for an audio piece. It enables individuals to bond with their family, to feel proud of their diversity and to think about where they came from. It also provides a record for those of us who wish to hear. “I’m enthused by people taking their story and capturing it from their family. Either as the basis for something else, a radio theatre piece or drama, or just as a personal piece – bonding with your family.” The work is an interesting combination of art as pleasure, the therapy of documenting ones own story, and the creation of a potentially integrative meeting point – allowing others to hear how you understand yourself. Jack Straw takes great pleasure in this. They have been working specifically with blind youth for 16 years. Working with this community came about as Joan's husband Jesse runs arts access programs for blind people. He was the initial link between the Department Services for the Blind and Jack Straw. Their collaboration centres on a summer program tun by the DSB called Youth Employment Solutions where kids from all over the state are brought together to stay in the University District for six weeks to learn mobility training, do work experience and gain a sense of independence. This annual program provides a perfect infrastructure, Joan told me, for Jack Straw to offer their services to the group. So they facilitate radio theatre workshops and music instruction to students who are interested in recording at the studios. Jesse's expertise in braille scripts and knowledge of access training is a real help, she says. It provides a professional ground-work for the empowering process of creating narratives. As well as giving these kids an equal playing field, and a voice, the studio provides an atmosphere in which failure and re-takes are very much part of the process. It allows the youth to experience the confidence that comes from succeeding after many times trying. Joan told me that they had recently started working with The Muscular Dystrophy Association also, a group that she has links with, but the lack of an annual infrastructure has meant that it has been much harder to make sustainable links. For Joan, what is exciting about her work with disability communities is the idea that it might enable distinct communities to come together and find their voice. Enabling individuals of the blind community to meet others in similar social situations for the first time, for example, is special. What I find inspiring about Joan's work is her commitment to service. Jack Straw is about giving a voice to the individual, and Joan has spent her working life dedicated to that purpose. I wanted to ensure a variety of experiences with institutions as well as singular projects went into this report, so I met with the genial Pete Rush at The Seattle Center - the gargantuan complex of culture in the heart of the city - to learn how such a destination point understands its work towards the community. Pete is Program Manager at the Center and told me its mission statement is to delight and inspire the human spirit and to engage

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in communities of all sorts and bring people together. I was keen to find out how they achieve it. The Seattle Center is a division of the city of Seattle, its own department, answering ultimately to the mayor and the city council. Originally it was the site of the 1962 world fair, now - celebrating its 50th anniversary - it's home to many of the city's big arts organisations, such as The Ballet, The Opera, numerous theatre companies, The Science Centre, The Space Needle and a number of resident organisations. What I was particularly interested in though was Seattle Center Productions, an arm of Seattle Center, which produces free and low cost community programming on site for participating ethnic communities and organisations. Almost every weekend, a community organisation is offered free or low cost use of the facilities and that group bring vendors, exhibits and cultural artefacts for interested parties (and anyone else who happens to be passing through the space for a wander). What this means is organic exposure of passing visitors to new cultures and concepts. The site hosts Italian Fest, Turkfest, Dia De Muertos (the Mexican Day Of The Dead) and many more, though sadly not as yet a festival organised by people with disabilities. While we might take from this that publicly funded spaces in Britain might also open up their facilities to participating organisations, the lesson here is also that communities must be aware and willing to engage in such opportunities to convert them into concrete possibilities. It's no easy task. Seattle Center also curate their own programming to increase community attendance. Free outdoor concerts and movie screenings have proved particularly popular. Along with the popularity of their free facilities (a food-court with free wi-fi, sculptured gardens and outdoor skate park) the success of their programming illustrates that to attract diverse communities in the current climate, a space needs to offer something fun, contemporary and fundamentally cheap or of no cost. This is something Pete feels strongly about. He created and maintains an arts access program for teenagers called Teen Tix, where teenagers can get five dollar admission for day of show tickets to up to forty partner organisations in the city. Providing cheap entry and an easily navigable structure of purchase, buying tickets to art becomes much less intimidating. It is a system worthy of recommendation. Pete says the plan has always been to produce as much as possible, accessify everything through cost and scope and to make the Center as relevant to the community as possible. They are already doing a very good job. One of the institutions the Seattle Centre houses is the amazing Experience Music Project Museum. Originally two museums - the Museum Of Music and the Museum Of Science Fiction in Pop Culture - the space was founded by Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, and built by the architect Frank Gehry. As well as huge exhibits on Seattle musicians like Jimi Hendrix and bands like Nirvana, the E.M.P has an amazing interactive sound studio (The Sound Lab), where beginners and experts alike can play all sorts of virtual instruments along to backing tracks, a huge stage area for music events and even recording studios. It really is a musician's dream come true. I was keen to visit this museum above others in the complex, as its focus on art and the group experience was hugely palpable.

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Jonathan Cunningham is the EMP'S manager o f You th P rog rams and Community Outreach. On the Youth side he runs their Youth Advisory Board, a group of 16 teenagers who help him influence teen programs at the museum. On the Outreach side, he is in charge of trying to develop strategies to bring in audiences that have traditionally not been heading to the museum. Though he's only been in his role a year, he is a great example of how taking an interest in the local community and being receptive to new opportunities can lead to great results. Currently, he said, there are no specific for programs for disabled communities, but he's always looking to expand. Community outreach allows him to strategise, and it involves him getting out into the world and making connections with individuals and communities through e-mail or conferences to spark new projects and new ways of learning. He says it may involve some heavy-lifting in the beginning but that's the only way to start. Jonathan told me that in the last year, encounters with various individuals from the disability community have led to more inclusive practice at the museum. Recently, he has been having conversations with a woman from the Washington State School of the blind. She's going to bring 8 students and 8 chaperones to experience the museum together, with the idea that they'll see how it goes. "The teacher will come back to us and let us know how we did. That creates a dialogue". It's an approach that has already stood them in good stead. Over the summer they ran a two week camp in collaboration with music therapy undergraduates and graduates at Seattle Pacific University, specifically designed for youth with Autism and Aspergers Syndrome. It strikes me as a clever strategy. Using existing expertise allowed Cunningham to utilise the Museum's facilities to an accessible end. They had great feedback, he says, and again we will learn from it and get better. "We have audio guides, it's all ADA compliant, visitor services and everyone at security got a one page sheet on how to understand people with Autism and Aspergers syndrome, but there's still a lot for us to learn." Jonathan tells me that the week before we met he met a Deaf woman at a conference and together they are working out how they might bring more members of the Deaf community to the museum. It's this almost entrepreneurial aptitude that I find inspiring. Jonathan's industriousness shows that any aspiring project that wishes to engage with different communities must get off its backside and go out there and meet them.

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DO-IT (standing for Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology) is neither a huge institution, nor an artistic project. It's actually part of The University of Washington's IT department, though it operates more like a non-profit. It's a pretty inspirational centre that promotes the success of individuals with disabilities in postsecondary education and careers, using technology as an empowering tool. Run by the inspiring Sheryl Bursgtahler, it has developed over the years into a fascinating hub for programs following the model of preparing young people with disabilities for college, careers, independent living, and leadership roles in society. I was particularly eager to learn about the 'DO-IT Scholars Program', which offers successful applicants with varying disabilities an integrative two-week summer community program, modelling leadership and technology skills. It's a model that has received world-wide praise, creating new connections amongst diverse individuals. I was keen to learn all I could. Sheryl started DO-IT in 1992. Her drive then, as now, was that capable individuals with disabilities face many challenges as they pursue academics and careers. As such, they are underrepresented in many rewarding fields, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. While believing in mainstreaming and inclusion, Sheryl's own experience of the education sector was that at school individuals with disabilities were getting lost. The kids who did the best socially were those whose parents had an active interest in creating magnets around them to encourage other kids to come and play (the best toys, parties and so on). But at 16, when teens became interested in unbridled independence, those who faced barriers from living independent lives would also become more isolated socially. It was something that needed to be countered. 'There needed to be something more'. So Sheryl set about raising grants to fund a number of ideas she'd been having in the area. Armed with a grant from the National Science Foundation (and many more since - from 1992 she's raised grants of literally millions of dollars), she set about creating a summer program for kids with disabilities, an online mentoring community and a faculty training program. Her background in technology was perfect - both fundamentally enabling for people with disabilities, as well as a cool thing for teens with disabilities to get into. It is indeed a happy marriage, and the dual focus of technology and confidence is symptomatic of Sheryl's intentions more generally. The summer camp's intention is for people to encounter big challenges - learning how you as a person with disability can become self-determinate, advocating for yourself, meeting people from very different backgrounds and disabilities - but lots of these lessons, she says, will "kind of sneak up on them". They'll be realised certainly, but they'll be realised through cool, camp experiences, rather than embarrassing talks from boring, po-faced adults. The DO-IT scholars program is two weeks long. It's open for applications from teens with disabilities who have an interest in going to college. It's also very competitive. On average they take about one third of the kids who apply. It's a mixture of social engagements, like group meals, movies or a dance, talks and lab work during the day, where they learn about different technologies, and field trips to Microsoft or The Science Centre, where they receive presentations from staff with disabilities. Previous scholars can apply to become interns on future camps, and their job is then to support new attendees and make sure everyone feels included. The DO-IT scholars program is a structure that has been refined after more than 10 years of existence, and there is much to take-away. Here are five key pointers. - Be intentional.

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At DO-IT every piece of the puzzle has been thought about, discussed and engineered. Sheryl's motivation was to provide a program to help people with disabilities find community at a difficult time in their youth, but also for that community to be heterogenous. ('Here, people realise 'it's not just me who's having a difficult time at school, but also that they have to accept, respect and learn about other people's differences'). This extended family only exists, says Sheryl, because it has been socially engineered to exist. 'You have to think of ways to get people together. You can't expect them to follow you.' Her hands-on approach is distinctly un-British. For Sheryl it's not necessarily about letting things grow organically, because if they don't - what's the point in your project? Building community with an intention also means that each activity in the day has a social purpose. Put food where you want people to be is something she's learned from experience. At the DO-IT dance, for instance, they hold a BBQ at the venue first, so that no one will show up late. And though you don't have to dance, you will be asked. This way kids who might not think a dance is for them face this hurdle of confidence, and get one under their belt. - Know your audience. One of the reasons the DO-IT scholars program has worked is because of it's focus on technology. Knowing her audience is primarily young, Sheryl keeps this focus as it imparts skills for future careers and also because it's a cool thing for kids to bond over (interestingly she thinks that the reason much assistive technology or service provision goes unused in schools is because boring things are being taught on it.) Sheryl also understand that teenagers want to hang out with teenagers - they don't care about older people. Young interns provide a good stop-gap between camp-authorities and new friends, and can aid that inclusion. - Be Sensitive DO-IT's audience are young people with disabilities. From experience, Sheryl knows that her scholars may face confidence issues at home or feel like outsiders at school. They understand that people feel very private over the subject of disability, and so though their aim is to engage individuals about these issues, they will do so through discussions of growing up, friendships and independence, rather than fixating on the issue of disability itself. - Create leadership models. Kids with disabilities are often told 'don't worry someone will do it for you'. This obstructs the confidence and leadership skills of people with disabilities and leads to a homogeneous society of employees. Sheryl keeps her scholars on their toes, by giving them missions to accomplish and tasks to take responsibility for. - Online Networks Email addresses of previous DO-IT alumni provides connections between current scholars and successful individuals with disabilities at top companies. They become role models. DO-IT has also created a new scheme, DO-IT pals, for those who didn't get onto the scholars program. Online networks of discussion lists and forums allow for a wide

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outreach, creating a community of young people who free to ask questions about their identity or daily lives within a safe forum. Each list is headed by a moderator who makes sure that anyone who posts a message will receive some sort of answer. No one is left out. O`ahu The last leg of my trip was to O'ahu, the most populous of the islands on the U.S. state of Hawaii. Being able to visit such a distant point was once again testament to the depth of opportunity that The Churchill Memorial Fellowship gave me. Without it, I could have never have dreamt of meeting with Steven Brown, one of the key figures of the disability culture scene in the last thirty years, nor could I have experienced the workings of the Very Special Arts movement. That I got do both was quite special. I am very thankful. Before either of these meetings, I got the opportunity to visit the Hawaii State Art Museum. From its very inception, the museum has had accessibility to art as a corner-stone of its identity. Much of the state's public art until then had been placed in different offices and buildings around the island and most of it was going un-seen. People didn't feel like they could walk into legislatures offices, for example, and ask to see the pictures. All in all, there was no destination point for people to come and see new works from local artists. So 10 years ago The Hawaii State Art Museum was set up in a building the state had bought a few years earlier to democratise the collection. Museum educator Susan Hogan has been at the museum for seven years. She gave me a fantastic tour of the place and told me about a number of events they run with the intent of creating a community around the arts. As well as a monthly lecture series, Sharon runs a family hands-on art-making event every second Saturday. Whole families, from babies to grandmas, come en masse and participate in the event - there can be up to 250 people. To engage all ages, Sharon says the art-making needs to be simple enough without being patronising. It works best when you present a theme, she says, - say, hats - and show how one could be made, then just lay the materials out. The freedom means people can engage with the activity at different levels. The type of activity changes every second-saturday, and this freshness also draws people in. One Saturday it might be weaving, the next pottery wheels. The end result is that the families learn a lot about each other, Sharon says, for it's not often they sit down and make something together. I was interested by this in terms of a creative process allowing new connections to flourish, but also wanted to know about the museum's work with marginalised people. Susan said the challenge in this regard is to make people feel familiar with the museum space, to feel like they own it (as this is a museum for the people). While the Museum hasn't had specific contact with any disability associations, they have an established outreach program for younger people in public schools called Art Bento. At Art Bento schools are encouraged to experience the museum, as well as respond to some of the art works back in the classroom via music or drama or visual art. As well as children from complex socio-economic backgrounds and new immigrants they have also held Art Bento with classes of individuals with developmental difficulties. Susan also showed me a touch board she herself had created for a child with low-vision who came on a school-trip to the museum, so that she could feel familiar with the surroundings. This familiarity is vital, says Hogan, because the kids can then grow up feeling like they belong in the space. Without Art Bento, it's unlikely they'll set foot in the museum. Repeat visits, she says, are crucial. You begin to see a build in confidence in the children making their way through the space. This is a key factor to think about for my own research, and

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for outreach access strategies in general. Often access is pitched at getting individuals into spaces they would otherwise not visit, but for Horgan, without a second visit, it's not an easy trip. The gap between people's understandings of their cultural limitations and what people can actually do, she is suggesting, needs addressing on more than a one-off occasion. It should be a continual engagement. For that reason Hogan wants more groups of young-people to use the galleries for their purpose, "to head-quarter there". She told me about a time when the Honolulu youth theatre wrote a play that started in the galleries and led its audience through the museum and out. For those few hours, the space was truly theirs. While the museum doesn't offer any particular program specifically for people with disabilities to experience art, or to experience art together with people from different communities, Horgan's passion for familiarity in potentially intimidating spaces for individuals from minority backgrounds was something I will take back with me. What was particularly striking, however, was a gallery within the space called 'I love art', an interactive art-making area showing representations of the art currently in the museum. A last stop on our tour, here was a place - granted for younger adults - that allowed you to take the works you had just seen and replicate them or make them your own. This on-site facility transformed the museum from an objective place of looking, to a place of doing and involvement. A way to enable familiarisation for whoever had come through the doors.

VSA (Very Special Arts) is an international arts and education organisation, which began in 1974 as a way of providing arts and education opportunities for people with disabilities, as well as promoting general inclusion in the arts and culture sector around the world. It is supported in America by state grants and exists in a number of cities across the country. I was lucky enough to participate in a session at the production studio at VSA Hawaii, meeting the artists and their instructors and learning about how and what they do. It was a special experience, and the group were kind enough to show me around and answer my questions. There was much chatting and laughter, and the atmosphere was light though hard-working. Carol, an instructor who started at VSA just last year, told me that a usual

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class is about six or so artists, working from around 1 to 5 after they've finished the lunch they've brought in. The numbers mean the space is both manageable and lively at the same time. The production studio of VSA Hawaii is housed in the beautiful Honolulu Museum of Art, which provides space for a number of artists classes and exhibitions. It is an inspiring space to play a part in, as beautiful as the new Saori looms that many of the class work on. Weaving plays a large role in the classes activity. And the Saori looms are deliberately designed to be accessible for individuals with physical disabilities or developmental difficulties who wish to weave. Wendy, one of the instructors of the class, had just come back from a Saori workshop where she had picked up a number of new techniques. The class were keen to learn them. While I was having a nice time chatting away, Marvin was keenly learning a new technique while Cassolie was champing at the bit to get onto the big loom. Marvin is amazingly prolific. He weaves a rug a day. And they're great too. The group weave from recycled materials donated from local craft shops, thrift stores and generous individuals. Rugs, scarves and recycled bags make up much of their output. Carol told me that the next goal is to make clothes. The pride of someone wearing the clothes you made, she said, is something we're keen to instil. The work is hard, Alice told me. As she was weaving a beautiful pink scarf, she showed me how if you put the shuttle in the wrong place you might have to start over. But it's also very enjoyable. What's fostered is an atmosphere of independence and support. Each artist can decide what to make, and what colour materials to use, and has the resources to achieve that and learn new techniques from other weavers. It's not all weaving though. Clancy was on a special project making rosaries of local saint, Father Damon, which are sold in the local religious shops. He has a degree in fine arts and sculpture but prefers working in a group than on his own. VSA is supporting him through his goal to potentially get started in his own practice. The rosaries he makes are incredibly beautiful with a fine detailed medallion. On the other side of the studio is Monica, who loves to draw illustrations of dog in a cartoon style, and has even had an exhibition in the museum itself. This sense of producing art for purpose, rather than as pure hobby, is very much part of VSA's essence. Materials created are often sold through local craft shops or the museum gift shop. There's also an annual festival called Made In Hawaii where the weavers show off their skills and goods, plus a big studio sale for the artists, which happens after thanksgiving. As a result, though the atmosphere is convivial, the production studio is a disciplined environment. It's for artists who want to take their craft seriously. Indeed a sign on the door of the studio highlighted a code of conduct: 1. Have a goal 2. Be on time 3. Respect others work habits 4. No food at work 5. Organise area 6. Clean up. For my part, the key lessons to take away are:

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1. Accessible resources are vital for artists with disability. 2. A professional atmosphere can also be fun. 3. Good instruction is vital. 4. Leaning new techniques keep people interested. 5. Having a place for your art to be seen by others encourages pride. 6. A manageable group means that everyone can get to know each other, creating community. My last meeting of the entire trip was with Steven E. Brown and his esteemed colleague Landry Fukunaga. It was a fitting end. Steven is one of the founding fathers of disability culture. He's Associate Professor at the Center on Disability Studies at the University of Hawai'i, and Co-Founder of the Institute on Disability Culture. In 1996 he gave one of the first definitions of disability culture to Mainstream Magazine: People with disabilities have forged a group identity. We share a common history of

oppression and a common bond of resilience. We generate art, music, literature, and other expressions of our lives and our culture, infused from our experience of disability. Most importantly, we are proud of ourselves as people with disabilities. We claim our disabilities with pride as part of our identity. We are who we are: we

are people with disabilities. (Brown in Mainstream Magazine, 1996). If I was to understand how people without disabilities might engage with disability culture to forge new connections and greater understandings, I had to pick his brains. To cover the depth of this meeting I've decided to split it into two sections, one on Steven himself and one on Landry, as each offered an array of unique and enlightening viewpoints. Steven Brown, as you'll have probably realised by this point, is a busy man. The CDS (Center on Disability Studies) currently houses 150 or so grant projects. Steven himself is on five or six of them. But what really gets him going is teaching. Last year he created a course called Disability History and Culture from Homer to Hip Hop, now online, which will also be the subject of his next book. For him, it's a topic that fundamentally underscores notions of identity, activism and pride amongst the Disability community. Steven's background is academic as well as activist. Whilst volunteering at a Centre of Independent Living in Oklahoma, he was also a young academic historian looking for a permanent post. He was invited for a job interview to research the history of a corporation, but was subsequently discriminated against because of his disability. His ensuing advocacy for the disability community, alongside his interest in history (both low-brow and high-brow) gives us an explanation as to why he became interested in the idea of Disability culture in the first place. It also gives us an indication of how he understands it. Steven tells me that initially, people thought it would connote a negative attribute - why would people want to define themselves as part of a disabled culture. Now, it is a huge part of many peoples lives. A cursory google search brings up millions of results.

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If people with disabilities have now re-claimed their identity, I say, what is still a challenge is creating spaces where they can educate, or at least meet the majority community, as themselves. While it's not to force integration, it is to say that a non-patronising meeting point would begin an assault on the dominant patronising charity model through which people without disabilities so often approach those in the community. Steven said the fundamental conundrum is people do want to be integrated - they want to be integrated as long as they are accepted for who they are, but they also don't want to lose their identity. It's a balancing act. It's about fostering your own sense of worth and independence, not as a hermit, but as an individual loved for your worth within a group. I asked whether a grassroots project could come someway to satisfying any of this. Steven told me that what's vital is that in meeting new communities, people with disabilities aren't somehow split from their own group too. Disability pride is also about pride as a people, 'what we've been through, the resilience we've shown'. But there are ways in which a new group can foster enabling attitudes, certainly. One way is for a grassroots community of people with and without disabilities to learn the history of disability, the journey - as Steven entitled his first book - from disability shame to disability pride. Grounding themselves in this knowledge will help to educate and shape values, attitudes and pride. Secondly, Steven says, when people feel powerless and oppressed and begin to obtain power, that's when the emphasis rightly moves on to leading. "It would be really hard to have a women's resource centre run by men". This is to say that that leadership and power are a rightful goal of an oppressed people, and those opportunities should very much be opened up for them. Finally, Steven, pointed me to Facebook to show flourishing forums of people with disabilities who are using art at a grassroots level to shape perceptions. The campaign 'This is what disability looks like' is part of the thriving disability scene on social networks, an exciting facet of disability culture in the 21st century. In this online group, people upload photos of themselves, or situations, to highlight a true picture of people with disabilities for the world to see. The power of online networks to spread messages is clear. My hope though is that these online forums will cross-over into the mainstream, affecting the perceptions of those who are unfamiliar with the topic. My concern is that without an opportunity for the disability community and the non-disability community to meet in the middle, their impact might fall into the gap that exists between the two. Landry Fukunaga first met Steven at a disability and diversity symposium, and later became one of his graduate students. The path that led her there was her background in psychology, specifically an interest in behaviour disorders and autism. As a classroom aid to a boy with special needs, she quickly realised that social concerns about singular aspects - his headbanging particularly - were a real obstruction to him being socially included and developing as a loved person. Benefiting so much from her attention, Landry became convinced that people needed to universally embrace such interactions, seeing and supporting each other as the same. Furthering her ideas on diverse communities in Steven's graduate class, Landry began Able-Bodied Artists in 2002 with her class-mate Brain Kajiyama initially as a class project. It began there, as a yearly festival to celebrate and bring awareness to the signing of the Americans With Disabilities Act (signed in 1990). The idea was to change a somewhat negative reception to this act (as people had sometimes to comply with things they didn't want to comply with) to a positive celebration of a civil-rights success.

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For Landry, encouragingly enough, Arts seemed like a good way to get people in the community together, to bring their kids and share time with people. 'We wanted people to stay so we wanted people to be entertained'. It's music, dancing, acting, visual arts. In fact, it's anything so long as the group is affiliated in some way or supportive of people with disabilities. Why they are doing the art, said Landry, is up to them. It's a personal decision whether art is for pleasure or for vocational rehabilitation, it's only confusing if therapy is imposed. Landry's focus, from the very start of the project, was how communities can be more inclusive, how she could get people to interact. Collaboration was always a key factor in her thinking. Planning with Brian, a person identifying with a disability, made it that much more meaningful. Together they went out into the community and identified people involved in the arts in some shape or form. And they came and helped co-plan the event. As an example of using art to help an audience join with the disability community, and take their cues from them, Landry's project is very much akin to my own philosophy. I was keen to learn the lessons she had learned from those early days in 2002 to aid my own understanding. What she told me was that the first year was a big eye opener. Nothing goes as planned, or at least, 'is perceived in the way you perceived it', she said. Though the festival tried to be as accessible as possible, they didn't have representation from all types of people with disabilities in their planning stage. And further, transportation to the event was actively disabling. It can be hard, she added, because you can't force people with disabilities to volunteer for council roles, and you have to gauge responses as widely as possible. For Landry, though, these reflections are all positive. Every year they put on the festival, it becomes a better event. To me, it already seems like a sparkling success. Able Bodied Artists try and involve the whole community around issues and performances from artists with disabilities. They have succeeded in reaching audiences of up to 1,500, and having created a visible community event allows them to engaged neutral passers-by in a community they would never have engaged with before. Landry has bigger plans. She's interested in building a community, and believes that nothing can have sustenance if it's a one day event. She wants to create a number of events on the back of the festival. Landry has concretised a model of community engagement in the mould of her and Steven's philosophy. It's incredibly inspiring. It's about celebrating and appreciating diversity, but in a space where people are welcomed to participate and still maintain their own identity and the identity of disability culture. Each year it grows, and becomes more accessible. The future seems bright.

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CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS ONE: THE NEED FOR INTEGRATION More than anything my Fellowship confirms that Britain will benefit from an increased focus on the integration of different communities through the arts and fully accessible arts projects. The absence of ‘bonding capital’ (Putnam, 2000) in today’s society, in both the UK and the countries I visited, is palpable. Of the projects and practitioners I visited, most were focused on providing a space for a group defined by a particular non-normative physical or mental condition. They do fantastic work. But there is a gap. Currently, there are few projects and spaces that are accessible enough for artists from different backgrounds to come together and enjoy each other’s work. This lack of opportunities fuels a greater gap, one that exists at a societal level. It’s the gap between an increasingly developed understanding of disability issues by the disability community and a lack of knowledge by those who aren't within it. This gap is getting wider and it’s leading to further segregation. Steven Brown is right to comment that ‘people with disabilities have re-claimed their identity’. Yet if there are few outlets for this identity to be understood by those who don’t experience the issues, both communities will lose out. What’s vital, as Putnam comments, is creating new points of meeting that are real, organic and alive, rather than 'learning' about each other through the distortions of the media. North America is further in understanding this problem, as well as a solution, than we are here in Britain. The gap exists there too, but less embarrassment surrounding identity politics has meant dialogue about the gap has progressed. Its had to. The Centre of Independent Living Toronto’s ‘Gateways Project’ showed that what embarrassment there is about talking about disability has lead to errors in medical screenings for cancer. That is to say that people’s lives are being jeopardised by societal inexperience with people from the disability community. The fear that exists around what one should do, say, or ask someone with a disability is costing lives. A sad corollary here at home appeared in a BBC report in March 2013 which said an inspection had found that Police are being "too sensitive" when asking victims of crime if they are disabled (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21865264), hence much disability hate crime was being overlooked. A fear about the grammar of disability, about how to be with people with disabilities, must be countered. As Putnam says, the advantages of an organic, experiential way of learning who people are and what they’re about, rather than through mere reports or the media, is vital. And Britain is ready for this type of evolving spirit. According to Channel Four, the Broadcaster of the 2012 London Paralympics, two thirds of its viewers reported a change in their perception of disability after watching the events (http://www.channel4.com/info/press/news/research-paralympics-coverage-helped-change-attitudes-to-disability). The accompanying twitter campaign #Is It Ok (launched on the Channel 4 show The Last Leg) asked viewers to tweet in to members of a panel of comedians and sports people with a disability questions of terminology and practice. A dialogue began. That dialogue must not be neglected, specifically at the level of communities and local government. KEY RECOMMENDATION: The Department for Communities and Local Government released a policy paper called Creating The Conditions for Integration in February 2012. It understood integration as an important principal of social tolerance and respect. In

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light of the findings of CILT’s Gateways Project and the BBC`s report on hate crime, integration must be understood as much more than that. More than political principal, we must understand integration as vital to the protection of marginalised lives and central to the promotion of justice. From the interviews I carried out, the following general points about integration should also be noted by the department alongside the above. - A focus on integration does not mean that existing communities of individuals who share the same culture should have less sway. They are not opposite to programs sponsoring integration. Projects like the Deaf Culture Centre are inspirational examples of spaces where people can find community in shared experience. - The Nothing About Us Without Us principle is vital for community interactions wishing to reject tokenism. Any concrete initiative that proposes to speak for or with the Deaf or Disabled communities, for instance, must be guided by members who identify with those communities. - Integration can become patronising if the principle becomes more important than the reason people are being encouraged to come together. Without a shared interest or passion, a gathering can make people seem like pawns in a game of political correctness. - Integration projects should attempt to reverse the social hierarchies implicit in the terms disability and able-bodied. To this end, individuals from the majority community must be allies of the disability community. Motives are vital. People who think they are attending projects ‘to help’ people from the disability community will understandably cause discord and offence. - Efforts of integration that don’t go some way to addressing the majority community’s neglect of the history of the disability community over the years, or make efforts to do more than merely ‘accommodate’ the cultures and languages of that community, run the risk of feeling hollow and piecemeal. - Despite the lack of knowledge about disability issues in much of the non-disability community, none should be turned away for that ignorance. Integration involves a willingness to learn, and that is vital. - Identity amongst differing communities, especially the Disability community, is complex, political and varied. This is a positive, not a negative factor; a reason for integration. KEY RECOMMENDATION: The current financial crisis has seen the Government hand pots of economic resources reserved for people with disabilities to local governments. The Independent Living Fund has not been ring fenced and some have suggested that local governments receiving the money may not use it in the same way (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/13/whats-the-plan-for-disabled-people). It is my keen hope that the Independent living Fund is continued. However, local decision makers could also learn something from the example of the state of Georgia, articulated earlier by Sharan Brown. This state's funding model shows that governments have the option to use funds in creative ways that fulfil more than a single purpose. If resources for people with disabilities are facing the squeeze than perhaps at least funds could be directed towards solutions that aid disability inclusion and social movement as well as other factors of a community’s daily life. TWO: THE ROLE OF THE ARTS AND MUSEUM SECTOR IN INTEGRATION Art is a fantastic way for people to come together. It is also an excellent way to communicate ideas and diverse identities. Performances like Tribes can unpick complex

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ideas, Pod Plays give people with atypical backgrounds a voice to tell their story, and at a general level collaboration with diverse people in a forum that celebrates unique ways of looking is fun and furthers enjoyment and expertise. Museums also offer a place for social connection over shared points of interest and a public space to articulate social ideals and ways of learning. KEY RECOMMENDATION: In the current economic climate existing arts and museum organisations, especially those with public funding, have a unique opportunity and responsibility to promote integration through complete access, creative programming and the promotion of different modalities of learning. As Georgia Krantz at The Guggenheim noted, in museums and art galleries the diversity of individuals coming across those they usually wouldn’t come across can be encouraged through radical inclusion, and cultivated into a ‘hub of community’. Much excellent work in this field is already done in England, but North American models point to new possibilities. These possibilities include: - Destabilising the idea that Sign Language is an interpretive tool, not a first language. By encouraging Deaf museum and art educators to give talks to a hearing audience in Sign Language - with an interpreter being someone who’s first language is spoken English, can alter perceptions. - Seeking new modalities of participating and teaching. The U.S. is further on this than we are here in the U.K. Each of the Art Institutions I visited had a raft of programs aimed specifically at individuals with disabilities so as to encourage their visit. A number of these programs, for instance those aimed at people with Dementia and MOMA’s Create Ability, are models that should be adopted where possible in the U.K. - The Guggenheim’s Mind’s Eye program shows new modalities of teaching art can become opportunities for diverse individuals to come together and learn from each other. By allowing visitors without disabilities to organically drift into open programs with people with disabilities foremost in mind, new relationships and understandings can begin. Perceptions can be altered. - Access should be understood as more than just programs to encourage people into the museum, nor simply as addressing structural issues, but as a sense of perspective throughout the institution that inclusion is a civil right. Everyone from the finance department to the gallery curators should be grounded in the notion of inclusivity. - Incorporating art-making facilities, like the I Love Art space at Hawaii State Art Museum, allows individuals to feel like a museum or art space is their own. It’s an easy way to allow people unfamiliar with a space to begin to feel themselves, relax, and create in an environment that doesn’t feel like it's for one specific class or person. Encouraging repeated visits to the space is vital in this respect also. Many of us feel intimidated in a large space on a first visit. - In my experience in the museum sector in England I've heard people discuss underused services for people with disabilities in publicly funded museums and art spaces. My interviews on this trip uncovered two differing perspectives on the matter that can be held as complimentary. Patt Copeland’s suggestion is that in the current period – where many people do think of disability services as optional extras – the disability community need to help organise visitors to use these services, to make sure they continued. This isn’t an unfair suggestion, so long as art and museum spaces realise they also have a responsibility to spread the message of their inclusiveness. If there are a lack of users of a particular service – say BSL interpreters – then the Museum must realise it is because they have not spread the message of welcome widely enough to the community who can

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benefit. Certainly we can agree that the importance of negotiating the economics of access is also vital. Prices of entrance can be hugely inhibitive, and should be noted as such. - Public encounters with art and learning do not have to take place in specifically designated locations. If art and learning doesn’t move to the people then it will always be the case that some individuals will not be able to access it, and others who choose not to visit these kind of spaces often won’t engage with important issues that are well expressed through them. Disability Out From Under and Toronto At Street Level were both hugely successful exhibitions that were deliberately held in public spaces. The idea was that people would come across issues they would have never have engaged with normally, through creative placements of curated displays in public forums. The possibility of integration through learning about others’ lives in the midst of everyday life is a fascinating possibility. KEY RECOMMENDATION: As well as incorporating the lessons above into existing institutions, British public life could also capitalise on the pioneering work done recently in disability heritage by following Buffalo’s example in creating a Bricks and Mortar museum space about the understanding of Disability through the ages. As a public space curated by people with disabilities it would enable a focal point for dialogue and understanding. THREE: CREATING NEW GRASSROOTS PROGRAMS OF ARTS AND INCLUSION The arts and culture sector can be used to create spaces of social interaction that lead to deeper relationships amongst people of diverse backgrounds. It can also create positive feelings around civil rights issues, as Landry Fukunaga’s work on the ADA shows. My fellowship allowed me to learn from many successful projects and services that pursued these ends but also to see where gaps existed at grassroots level. These gaps are important. Sheryl Burgstahler started her inspirational DO-IT program because she realised that at the age of 16 kids with disabilities became socially isolated from those who could radically pursue their independence as society was set up for them to do so. Here was her gap. The gap I saw on my fellowship was of projects curated for people from the disability and non-disability community to pursue a shared interest for reasons of pure pleasure. The positive corollary of this is that I discovered many excellent programs where professional work created under the banner of an accessible ideology was enabling integration by drawing talented artists together. The negative corollary is that I saw a handful of accessible projects aimed at a amateur skill levels, which seemed to incorporate individuals irrespective of their passion for the activity. Another common approach, assessed differently by different corners, is accessible projects catered for a therapeutic purpose. There were also many great projects catering for a specific group or community. Less common, however, were projects like Keys To The Studio, which were accessible and open to all people and levels of musicianship, but encouraged both passion and the creation of something artistically vibrant and new. Keys To The Studio is also unique because imbued in its purpose is the idea of creating strong leadership models for people with learning difficulties. This was another gap that I encountered. While many of the accessible arts and museum projects created positive opportunities and leadership prospects for people with physical disabilities, the programs which were attended by people with learning and developmental disabilities usually incorporated them as followers of a creative strategy rather than directors of it. It’s a gap that those wishing to curate a project in this area might well consider. Collaboration is key to more inclusive societies, but part of that is shifting entrenched stereotypes of who holds

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power in society. The empowerment of people with learning and developmental disabilities must not lag behind other success in the disability community. And yet early work in this area may involve activists not in that community, to help model leadership and breach an initial gap of confidence that Sharan Brown at The University Of Washington ably articulated. KEY RECOMMENDATION: The American charity Materials For The Arts takes donations from big companies and banks and uses the funds to supply grassroots arts projects with professional equipment. These materials allow relatively local projects to become attractive hubs of enjoyment. It is a model the UK could benefit from greatly in a time of economic hardship. Corporate Social Responsibility Departments could easily bring change by implementing this system. From my research a number of practical and ideological thoughts came to the fore about the shape a successful new project should take. Practically speaking: - Great materials (as stated above) is key to creating an attractive, enjoyable and aspirational environment. - For Rose Jacobson a project starts with a base. A physical space is key to knowing your confines and your possibilities. - Making online networks and email connections is an easy way to reach out to new audiences and knowledge bases. - Finding an audience doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. Fishing where the fish are, says Joan Rabinowitz - that is engaging with pre-existing organisations who may be interested in working with your project - allows you to delegate some of the organisation. - Integration occurs organically when you attract different audiences through the same event. By showing films that united fans of different genres The ReelAbilities Film Festival in New York succeeded in creating new dialogues. - Keeping costs down and setting up in less urban areas spread access of a project to those less privileged geographically and economically. - A continual commitment to access means learning from your members, responding to their individual testimonies and having a sense of their medical needs as well as their interests and talents is important. - Tangible results and achievements allow a sense of pride amongst members. A piece of art or recording of a jam session, for instance. - Vital also is Dan Cohen’s advice that a project must seek to maximise its potential engagement with its audience. If it occurs once a year then the socialising effect on participants, say, will likely be less than a program that happens each week. - For Provail, however, the intimacy of a small project was also a key factor to their success. It suggests that creating new, manageable branches of a project might be preferable to growing things centrally. This also creates the possibility of a project transitioning into a movement, a program that can be re-created by different people across different borders and boundaries. At an ideological level: - A project must engage with the individuals who belong to it. Not only because integration is an effort to remember those who society tries to forget, but also because their abilities, passions and needs will shape the space of participation.

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- For this reason a project that engages with the disability community, as afore said, must be organised to a good degree by people who partake in that community and represent it. - This is not to say that the entirety of the organisational body must identify with that community, nor should that be a guarantor of participation. What is vital is that those who create and sustain the project must be united by a philosophy that engages with issues of disability in an inclusive and emancipating way. Even if their opinions within that philosophy are hugely divergent. - An openness to the individual means that a project must be fluid, both alive to the different perspectives within communities, and ready to move to those it sets out to engage with (rather than holding to pre-ordained notion of what it was ‘meant to look like’). It should move forward. Artistically: - The terminology of ‘artist’ is vital. Even if a project doesn’t specifically cater for a professional audience, the realisation that participants are together creating and are to be respected for doing so is not just bonding it is liberating and true. - Including people with diverse bodies, backgrounds and beliefs is creatively invigorating. As at Keys To The Studio, new modalities of art should be encouraged.This doesn’t mean that formal training should be neglected. It means that the artistic process should revolve around the person, as Kitty Lunn’s teaching demonstrates – as much as the person revolves around the artistic process. - A project must be fun. Or else why would anyone want to go… FOUR: THE FUTURE OF ACCESS There has been much work on access on both sides of the Atlantic. Though progress has been slow, much has begun to change in the last few decades. Yet much remains to be done. What is clear from my research is that access is critical to integration. The idea of people meeting and engaging with each other depends on the ability of all to access the same resources, transport, homes and public spaces. KEY RECOMMENDATION: The message about access and universal design needs of course to reach those who are responsible for public institutions and buildings. But it also needs to reach those who aren’t - the everyday individuals who could never invite a wheelchair user round for tea because they live in homes with no access. It is these people we must also switch onto the issue to build a consensus. Simply, we need to bring the message to the non-disability community. That requires the co-operation of influential charities and pressure groups to build a public campaign but also to lobby the government, particularly as the Financial Times reported in April 2013 that the UK government is preparing a review of new-build housing standards in England that could reduce the requirements on house builders to provide minimum standards of access. (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d3407a40-a5cf-11e2-b7dc-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Qf7DuLbk). One way to do this is by targeting the curriculum, enabling the next generation to be more literate in Universal Design Theory than the present one is. A reachable goal is the inclusion of Universal Design Theory under the ‘inequalities’ bracket of Sociology A Level, it is my hope that influential projects gather behind this. From my interviews, the interested parties of North America generally see the future of access as bright, but with particular challenges. They are challenges that we would be well to take into account on these shores:

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- According to a number of the people I interviewed, access in urban areas has improved over the last decade, but access for those living rurally has stagnated. It is an issue that must not be neglected. - At the Open Studio in Toronto one of the key thoughts that came through discussion was that access doesn’t stop with full inclusion at an event. If transport is inaccessible or late, than the experience of attending an event is still one of a lack of access. The chain of access, if you will, is broken. The challenge is for events and community organisers to see this bigger picture when considering accessibility. - Training staff in public museum and arts spaces is a challenge that has been recognised and implemented in all of the public museum spaces that I visited during my fellowship. From personal experience of the museum sector I know that North America is much further than we are in Britain at training front line staff to be part of an inclusive environment for all people. Part of this has to do with recognising the individual. Paying attention to the individual and the resources required to make that individual’s experience one of inclusion is a challenge that we need to recognise beyond ‘access strategies’. KEY RECOMMENDATION: While in Toronto I visited the Deaf Community Centre as a point of comparison between the challenges that community faces in terms of access in public life, and those which the disability community faces also. One challenge the Deaf community certainly face is an attitude from the majority community that their language is not part of their culture, rather ‘a translational tool’, something to fall back on, or even ‘a disability’. This is inherently offensive but it also creates a language barrier between those belonging to and not belonging to the Deaf community. Thinking that Sign Language is a tool for the deaf, not a first language like French or German, people shut themselves off to embracing an exchange with that community. A simple way of promoting Sign Language as a language is once more to enshrine it as part of the National Curriculum. Offering Sign Language in schools as a language option would further understanding of the huge culture it embraces and enable integration between communities. As well as challenges, my research also showed me, positively, three very different ideas on how ‘access’ might be thought of in the context of the integration of diverse individuals in public life. - Audrey King showed me that humour is a great way to engage people about issues they don’t know or understand. Jokes and skits like her books provide easy access for unfamiliar topics to new audiences, and responsibly so when authored by people with personal experience. ITV’s Britain’s Got Talent TV show featured in early 2013 a brilliant 14-year-old comedian called Jack Caroll. Jack’s routine about his Cerebral Palsy allowed the audience access to an issue that many of them will likely have never thought about before. - On a more abstract level, visiting the IRDC in Toronto opened up the idea that the language of technology might positively affect social understandings of ‘disability’. Rather than seeing disability as something incomplete, familiarity with the vocabulary of technology might allow people to realise the validity of the idea of the diversity of human experience customised to each and every person (a concept we are more familiar with). New vocabularies can help societies access and understand truths, and they should not be discounted. Though the thought does require much more study, it is one that deserves attention. - Finally, my visit to Art With Heart in Seattle showed me that access can also be understood as an individual’s own journey to accepting his or her own worth in society.

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Having access to the idea of your own value - to yourself and to others, is a vital grounding for engaging with other people. Fundamentally, the future of access is intertwined with the future of integration. We can only learn how to provide an inclusive atmosphere from the witness of those so often not included, and we can only encourage their presence by a willingness to hear that testimony. We must continue to think and learn about the notion of access as inclusion, without castigating those who seek to do so, because there is simply so much at stake.

A POSTSCRIPT Since returning from my trip I have turned my focus to the issues, conclusions and recommendations that I have raised in this report. I have begun planning my own arts project called 'The Album Club' and am also looking forward to disseminating my findings to arts institutions, leaders of the disability community, local decision makers and my MP. I am hugely thankful to everyone who was involved in this project, but most of all I want to say thanks to the wonderful people at The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust, without whom none of this work would exist.

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