About Diversity Matters

We met through our interest in and passion for Inclusion and collaborated on person-centred planning work and designing new services. Much of our early work towards Inclusion focused on designing alternative ways of supporting people so that they received highly personalised and individual responses not standard solutions.

Then, as senior trainers and consultants with the SHS Trust, we worked together on a number of training and development projects and learnt a lot about ways to work with different interest groups and encourage partnerships.

Diversity Matters was formed in 2001 and our work 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.

We spend a significant amount of our time as facilitators, working directly with people who use services and families. We also teach and train a wide range of groups in person-centred planning, community building and other courses. An increasing focus is on running and organising events or forums to bring different interest groups together as part of organisational or community change.

Focus for current research is in:

•  Working therapeutically with people who don't use words, and learning about how different people understand the world

•  Investigating the interface between person-centred planning and process work

•  Exploring diversity in organisational life

•  Using complexity theory to bring awareness to the patterns that help or hinder organisational change