Nothing About Us Without Us: The Dos and Don’ts of Meaningful Co-Design
Scroll down for Easy English version I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks learning from ten organisations as part of my Churchill Fellowship exploring sex education for adults with intellectual disabilities. I’m currently on my way back from an insightful co-design session at Thorne Harbour Health and reflecting on what makes this style of approach meaningful when it could so easily become tokenistic. Co-design is not about holding a few focus groups to validate a final product. It’s about ensuring collaboration with people with lived experience from conception to execution, valuing all expertise equally, challenging one’s own defensiveness and unconscious bias, and creating time and space to prioritise accessibility at every stage. People with an intellectual disability (PWID) are, by definition, experts in what it means to live, love, work, and play as a differently abled person in a world structured to exclude and marginalise. This community has long called for “nothing a...