Blog: Changing the job landscape for people with learning disabilities and autistic people

By Lindsay Henderson, Head of Communities at Your Voice Counts

We’re very proud and vocal about the fact that a significant proportion of our workforce has lived experience of learning disabilities and autism – currently there are 22 people on our staff team working in roles that we created specifically for people with their lived experience.

As a charity, co-production has always been something we’ve strived to incorporate into our working and governance practices. We have a representative Board and have delivered countless projects and initiatives over the years that have created spaces and opportunities for people who use our services to input into how we design and deliver our work.

Supporting people into paid employment with us is without a doubt one of the most valuable ways of ensuring our services truly meet the needs of the communities we want to support. In peer support roles, people with lived experience offer insight and empathy in a way that would be impossible for staff in traditional project worker roles. At a strategic level, roles in areas such as commissioning, research, performance and quality give us access to viewpoints, ideas and information that may not otherwise be available to us.

In return, we’re committed to making sure that people with lived experience are valued and paid fairly for the contribution they make. All our lived experience roles are evaluated using our standard salary structure which recognises the specific skills and experiences that are needed to do these jobs and ensures equity across all of our workforce.

We’ve increased the number of lived experience roles over the years (from only 7 in 2019) and with that have taken time and effort to develop our processes around how we recruit, onboard and support these colleagues in their positions.

Our Changemakers staff group started in our Communities team and has been a key part of this, helping us to refine our approach and learn more about how we can help them to fulfil their potential. We are now continuing the Changemakers’ work across our organisation, bringing huge benefits to us as an employer and to our lived experience colleagues as individuals and the wider community we exist to serve.

Meet some of the YVC Changemakers

We're always happy to discuss our approach and share our learning - please drop me a line at lindsay.henderson@yvc.org.uk if you'd like to get in touch.