|
About Diversity Matters
Diversity
Matters was formed in 2001 by Pat Black and Andy Smith. They started
working together because of their shared passion
for a more inclusive world. Much of their early work
focused on developing alternative ways of supporting people, creating
new organisations so that more people received highly personalised and
individual responses not standard
solutions.
In the 1990's as senior consultants with the SHS
Trust, they worked together on a number of national training and
development
projects bringing together different interest
groups and encouraging partnerships.
Today, they spend a significant amount of their time
as
facilitators, working directly with people who use services and
families.
 They also teach and run training courses on a wide
range
of issues like
person-centred planning, community building, diversity, deep-democracy
and facilitation.
A recent focus for Diversity Matters has been running
and organising events or forums to bring
different interest groups together as part of organisational or
community change. The range of work we do has evolved along with our
learning about process work and we have
become
increasingly involved in the work of Altrum organisations, fostering
inclusive practice and small scale local initiatives in Scotland.
Other new areas of work include:
• Working
therapeutically with people,
including those who don't use speech
• Investigating the
interface between
person-centred planning and process work
• Exploring diversity
in organisational life and
community life
• Using complexity
theory and process work methods to bring awareness to
the patterns that help or hinder organisational change
|
