My research is now live!

After a long wait to get approval from the University ethics committee, I have now been given the go-ahead to make my research public!

There are 3 parts to this research:
1) A survey of co-ops in the UK to find out how many co-ops have disabled members and to what extent co-ops have taken into account disabled people’s access needs;
2) Interviews with disabled people who are or have been members of co-ops, about their experiences in co-ops and what they think and/or how they feel about the intersections between co-ops and disability;
3) A few case studies of co-ops which were created by and/or for disabled people, and/or intended for the purpose of meeting disabled people’s specific needs. (Examples could include housing co-ops specifically providing accessible housing, workers’ co-ops consisting of disabled workers, or co-ops providing services such as personal assistance, sign language interpretation, or disability equality training.)

The survey is now online here on Leeds Online Surveys. This is meant for co-ops (rather than individual members) and should typically take no more than 15 minutes to fill in.

For more details about the interviews, please see my call for participants.

If you know of a co-op that you think it might be good for me to do a case study on, please contact me. I am already aware of some co-ops that I would like to do case studies on (most of which are relatively local to me, i.e. in the North of England, particularly West Yorkshire and Manchester/Lancashire areas), but it would be great to know about any other co-ops involving disabled people in the UK, even if it doesn’t end up possible (for time/capacity reasons) to do case studies of all of them!

As well as this website, I am now on Twitter as @DisabledCoOps, so please follow me there to keep updated! (I now need to work out how to integrate a Twitter feed into this site…)