Social Inclusion – what it looks like from a lived experience perspective

I came from a forced integration and segregation system went I was at school, their programs, and businesses that tailor to my needs and support. At that time, I didn’t understand what those terms means, and knowing how I can speak up; “what about other individuals who are different? Can they get involved with us too?”.

Understanding inclusion is one of biggest challenges in society to understand how it works, especially from individual and community perspective. The definition of inclusion is very clear according to the Google search ‘define inclusion’….

“The action or state of including or of being included within a group or structure.”

This definition tells you who, what and how inclusion works. So, I want to share you from my experience of how to develop a social inclusion journey.

To break down this definition, I want to make sure you can understand how it does work.

What: methods and approaches to involve or include from different individuals in same place or time

Who: everybody or everyone from all walks of life who are different from each other

How: promote the openness of how you structure the action from the methods and approaches you are working towards.

Why? Simply it helps individuals who want to share experience with others. This could mean they never learn a particular action before and provide them an opportunity to grow and thrive within their lifestyles.

So, this is what inclusion means. The troubling part to make this work within your business and community group is to draw the model of how it promotes inclusion.

Before I give you a deep thinking of how you can promote and act on inclusion, I have developed a table of what type of businesses and groups comparing their differences of inclusion and segregation (or integration):

There are a lot of existing businesses/organisations that do not promote inclusion can provide an opportunity to change their methods and approaches. For instance, your local soccer club of your town or suburb. Personally, I was the only individual with a disability at my local soccer club when I was a child. This is a good example of inclusion. How this happened? It may be that my parents, or the coach of the club have spoken to learn about who I am, and how I got involved.

In the table above, you can tell how those differences are made. For instance, how multicultural groups are identified as ‘inclusive’? Cultural identity is a singular identity that comes from lived experience based on their demographics, however within this identity there is likely a person also has a disability, youth, or different sexuality. This is an example of inclusion in their communities. There are also same approaches or methods from a local youth or mental health services who are supporting individuals from different demographics.

The pitfalls of business models

It quite disappointing that the society is still not promoting inclusion as a norm today. There are still many governments run and local enterprise business models are not strategizing on how inclusion works in their systems.

By judging how the system set up, the businesses thrive by earning profits to maintain their solvency however the attitudes on focusing profits over people are reflective on not promoting inclusion.

This is how we are not seeing any further development of inclusion in our business models so far in innovative world. For instance, NDIS providers focus on their target demographics to give them support and services the participants are essentially to have. However, it is still segregated based on the elements and values of the system model they adopted from.

Conclusion

It is identified that the definition and actions towards social inclusion is poorly understood, and not being achieved in business models. From a lived experience perspective of having disabilities, I stated that the differences between inclusive and segregated group types. This should help you to understand the challenges and barriers of the individuals who would like to expand their horizons on sharing experiences with other individuals on the same outcome.

We need to explore more approaches on how we promote and act on creating inclusive society and businesses. We need to change the way how we run our businesses and groups, otherwise the society won’t make ourselves included!