Pete Donnelly On How Autonomy Empowers Entrepreneur's With Disability To Catalyse Systems Change
Pete Donnelly, a disabled social entrepreneur from the UK, has spent the last decade working in programme management roles across several charities that focus on supporting disabled people.
After ten years of working in charities, Pete realised that it was time to make a change to the lives of wheelchair users and founded his social enterprise, The Wheelchair Skills College, with the vision that every wheelchair user should have access to learn essential wheelchair skills, believing that filling this current gap is more than a ‘nice to have’ service and is in fact a fundamental human right.
Pete is a TEDx speaker, with his talk “Finding freedom in using a wheelchair” being viewed more than 10,000 times. Pete has recently been awarded a Churchill Fellowship to explore “Innovation through lived experience of disability” and is travelling across Australia and New Zealand for his research.
Pete discusses the social return on investment created by providing freedom and autonomy for people with disabilities, and how this empowers entrepreneurs to develop user centred innovations with lived experiences at heart.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Sarah Ripper] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in innovation and social entrepreneurship?
[Pete Donnelly] - I started using a wheelchair close to 18 years ago now, and when you start using a wheelchair for the first time, you'll only see the barriers. You enter a different world, and you're seeing everything that's going to stop you from doing the things you used to do.
I was lucky early on to learn wheelchair skills, those things you need to get around and manoeuvre your wheelchair pushing, going up and down ramps or curves. Then you move on to the more advanced things, like steps and escalators, but I was lucky to learn these skills early on.
It's not always the case that you get to do that, because it's not part of the healthcare system we have in place. These skills gave me the confidence and ability to go out and do all this other stuff, so I was able to go out and travel, work, play sports, and socialise, but all these things were built on the foundation and ability to use my wheelchair fully.
I went out and did those things; I did a lot of traveling and went and got my degree. I then started working for many different disability charities, and then fast forward 10 years or so, I started thinking, “why isn't this training standard?”
It makes no sense, why would you give someone a wheelchair, but not the skills to use it? At that point I thought this is something I want to see change, and that's when I decided to set up my social enterprise The Wheelchair Skills College, with the vision that everyone should have access to wheelchair skills.
It shouldn’t be just a small number of people who can access these skills as it is now, the training should be embedded in the system and available to everyone. Whatever age or ability they have, whether they're an ambulant or a full-time user, a temporary or permanent user, or even whatever type of wheelchair they use shouldn’t matter.
I use a manual chair, but for people who use power chairs they still need the skills development. For people who are assisted and maybe get pushed around, they still need skills as well. I saw this as a massive gap, and I thought this is something that needs to change, so how could we make that happen? That was the start of my journey and it's been ongoing since then.
Since starting The Wheelchair Skills College, what have your programs looked like and how have you been able to make a difference to the lives of wheelchair users?
I started by exploring where this skill training could be delivered. Initially I knew I wanted to remove as many barriers as possible for people accessing these skills, so the idea was always to take it to where they were. I started reaching out to hospitals and the NHS trying to figure out how to work with them, but I then started looking at delivering with other charities in the community, schools and colleges as well.
I was reaching out to as many of these places as possible, and some have progressed more than others. I was working with the NHS and their wheelchair services for a bit, but that didn't go as far as I hoped it would. I started looking at different charities, and that was just on the flip side of the pandemic as well. There were other priorities coming up then, and I then started working with schools.
That was interesting because it was a different environment than I'd taught them in before. My background is teaching people with spinal cord injuries wheelchair skills, which I've been doing for 16 years. We would go into the schools, but it was just a different environment. Sessions had to be adapted because the kids who were coming down didn't have that time in their day to spend six hours practicing wheelchair skills, so we had to cut that program down a lot.
The way I was teaching became different for the kids in schools, because some have profound learning difficulties, even maybe non-verbal as well. We had to adapt the sessions slightly, but it was great because at the end of the sessions, everyone took something away from it.
That was a real affirmation of my idea that wheelchair skills are for everyone, it doesn't matter whether you are learning how to go up and down steps, it's about the confidence you gain from learning these skills.
We did some work in schools, and we are still trying to push that forward because that's a big area that needs a lot of change as well. The latest one I've been working on is partnering with a disabled persons organisation in West London, and we're about to start delivering wheelchair skills in the community, which is pretty exciting because that's what the goal is. It’s going to be great to try that out and see what interest we can get from the local health board after that.
What learnings have you obtained through living at the nexus of disability, innovation, and broader experience in the space?
My experience, especially in delivering wheelchair skills isn't something that is going to make a huge return on investment. It's something that makes a huge difference to people's lives, but not a huge return on investment, and for me that's okay. This is a passion project; it's not about making money.
What it will do though is it will make a huge social return on investments, and it will make a huge difference to these people's lives. It essentially creates ongoing savings for funders from different spaces, we'll reduce pressures on health and social services. There are strong benefits, and I think that's not the way the innovation is viewed from my experience, here anyway.
When I'm going for innovation funding, it's usually focused on technology and projects that can be massive, and that's something which needs to be shifted. This is because for a valuable service, something someone wants, it just needs to change the way people live or support them. It's not going to make money, but that's okay.
What prompted me to apply for the Churchill Fellowship was I had this one idea for wheelchair skills and how it can change some people's lives, but what about all the other innovators out there, people who have similar ideas who could again make a massive change, but don't have a pathway to follow.
I want to understand how we can support people with these ideas and create systems change. That was an interesting thing about my fellowship, it became quickly apparent it's not just about this pathway, it's about ecosystem change. You can't just provide have all this training for an individual and expect it to work, it's very multi-layered.
You must be concentrating on so many different areas, and this expanded what I was looking at a lot. It was just interesting to be exploring and starting to look at all these different aspects, because my brain is firing up different ideas now.
I've started connecting with different people, and even as I've started compiling the report now, I'm starting to figure out what it could look like and how it can be used.
It's exciting that my idea and understanding of innovation has evolved so much, and that's something I think needs to happen as well; innovation needs to change. Our idea of it needs to evolve to become more inclusive.
There was some great stuff I saw in Australia, particularly around the NDIS scheme. I know it’s a relatively new system, but it's something that is so much better than we have over here.
Giving people autonomy and ability to shape up their car and the equipment they get is so impressive. I know from speaking to lots of different people about it that it's not perfect. It's not without its flaws, but it is such a great system.
Autonomy will then help support disabled innovators, because you then have a disabled community who have a choice of where they go and what they buy. They know the products that are going to be best for them, and they'll be able to choose those.
I think disabled innovators are in the best place to benefit from that freedom. It's about connecting the disabled community and making sure they are empowered, have choice, and control. That's going to be a big part of making sure disabled innovators can move forward. There are also ideas around spending from local governments.
Across different states it works slightly differently, but I heard that there was a minimum spend on social enterprises from some local authorities. That's a powerful thing to do as well. Again, that’s something we don't have over here. We have a system, but it's not as impactful as I believe your system is, and it's not as fair either.
Being able to invest in people and organisations that are there to make a social change is powerful and impactful. Those are two things off the top of my head which stood out, but I'm going back through all my interviews now while putting the report together. No doubt there's going to be so much more that comes out of it while I’m looking through that.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across creating amazing change?
When I was in Melbourne, I met Melissa Noonan who set up Limbs 4 Life. This was after she had had an amputation herself, and she looked around and saw that she wasn't getting the information she needed. For the last 20 years, she's been working at changing that, and now all her support documentation and learning materials are embedded within the systems for people going through rehab in Australia.
That's amazing because of the level of peer support and insight people can get during what's going to be a scary time of their lives. It's about peer support and resonated with me because it's something I do as well.
For that peer support, it was great to see how 20 years down the line she'd been able to embed herself within that rehab process, and it wasn't plain sailing, but it was great to hear that even with the difficulties in getting there, we can make that change.
It's great to hear about the start-up projects around which give people the ability to focus when they're online and not get distracted. This can be for people with ADHD, and the initiative is Focus Bar.
Again, this is using lived experience of being on his computer and getting distracted, which I think we can all relate to in some way. Going over to Brisbane, Santiago Velasquez is working on Halo, which is an app for people with visual impairments enabling them to use public transport.
He's been successful in getting it trialled I believe in Brisbane and Melbourne, so he’s making big steps there which is great. All these different innovations start somewhere and watching them grow is beautiful. There are so many things I saw and systems in place to support that growth as well, all impressive stuff.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
The best resource we have is being able to go online and connect with other people and innovators to see what's out there. We've got the technology now to connect wherever, we're having this call from the opposite side of the world now! We've got so many resources we can find online, we can use different social media platforms, and YouTube is an amazing resource I use a lot as well.
I find that when I'm looking for something., I'm always able to connect to someone online and find those answers. To have people connect with me as well is a blessing, so go out there and find out more about who's working in this space and doing similar things to you.
Any parting thoughts before we finish our interview?
Innovation is an amazing thing; the ability to think in different ways and make a change. Whatever size it is, whether it's for us, our community, or the world, look around at how you can make things better. If that is some of the change you want to see, then go for it.
