Moving beyond neurodiversity ‘awareness’

In September, we held a neurodiversity training session run by the fantastic Janine Booth from Red in the Spectrum. Part of our goal as an organisation is to become a just workplace that centres collective wellbeing. An important strand of this work is to ensure we remove barriers for neurodivergent people in the workplace.
As a team, we recognise that workplaces and their working practices can be inaccessible to neurodivergent people.
We chose to work with Janine for this training because of her focus on transforming workplaces, and moving beyond neurodiversity ‘awareness’ – as many productivity-oriented and employer-aligned neurodiversity trainings emphasise.
From her wealth of lived knowledge and professional experience working with trade unions, Janine guided us through the following elements of creating a neuroinclusive workplace: experiences of minority neurotypes; understandings of neurodiversity within the team; the social model of disability; identifying and removing barriers within the workplace, and our wider organisational activities.
The training raised several areas of further sustained work for us as an organisation, and we will now be working consistently to identify and remove barriers within our working practices, to create an organisation that works for everybody.
We thoroughly recommend Red in the Spectrum Janine Booth as a neurodiversity trainer!