Take a minute and think back to the last budget cycle in your organisation.
When the spreadsheet got tight, what got cut?
The disability inclusion budget? The accessibility audit? The line item for paid lived experience contribution? The training program? The community partnership? Is it the accessible event format that costs slightly more than the standard one?
If any of those things were on the chopping block — and they usually are — you’ve just learned something important about your organisation. Not about its values. About its maturity.
It’s been a tough six months
I’ve had a lot of conversations recently with other consultants in this space. The story has been consistent. Work has slowed. Budgets are tighter. Contracts that should have been signed are sitting in queues waiting for executive sign-off that never quite comes. Engagements that were scoped in February have been pushed to the second half of the year, then to next year, then quietly disappeared.
Everyone is finding it hard. And inside organisations, the pattern is recognisable from the other side too. Inclusion leads are telling me the same things. The strategy is still on the website. The DIAP is still on the shared drive. But the budget intended to operationalise them has been reallocated to “core business.” The community partnerships are being renegotiated. The paid lived experience consultation has been replaced with a stakeholder email.
None of this is a values failure. It’s a structural one. And it tells you something specific about where the organisation actually sits on inclusion.
The first-cut test
Here is a question worth sitting with. If your organisation faced a 10% budget cut tomorrow, where would the cut fall?
In most organisations I work with, the honest answer is: the line items that are most easily framed as “discretionary.”
Inclusion training.
Accessibility upgrades.
Community engagement.
Paid lived experience contribution.
Translation and Easy Read production.
Specialist consulting.
The diversity event.
These line items get cut first, not because they are less important than the things that survive. They get cut first because they sit in the organisation’s hierarchy as add-ons. They are funded as projects, not as operating expenses. They appear in inclusion plans, not in core operational budgets. And when funding tightens, the things structurally separated from “the business” are the ones that go.
This is the first-cut test. What survives when funding gets squeezed reveals where inclusion actually sits in the organisation’s architecture. Not where the strategy document claims it sits. Where it actually sits, when no one’s watching, the language.
Two patterns I’m seeing
In the last six months, I’ve watched this play out in two distinct ways.
In the first pattern, organisations have cut inclusion budgets quickly, quietly, and with very little internal pushback. The inclusion lead has been told to “do more with less.” Community partnerships have been let lapse without renegotiation. Specialist consulting engagements have been deferred indefinitely. The annual accessibility audit has been replaced with an internal review by a staff member with no specific expertise. Nothing has been announced. The strategy is still in place. The work has simply stopped happening.
In the second pattern, organisations have absorbed budget pressure differently. Inclusion has stayed funded. The community partnerships have been honoured. The paid lived experience contribution has remained the same. The accessibility upgrades have been delivered on schedule. What has shifted instead is internal operational spending, leadership travel, marketing campaigns, and other line items that the organisation has identified as more flexible. The inclusion work has been treated as a baseline, not a buffer.
The difference between those two patterns is not the budget size. I’ve seen both in well-resourced and under-resourced organisations. The difference is where inclusion sits in the organisational architecture. If inclusion is structurally embedded — in operating budgets, procurement policy, governance documents, and risk frameworks — it survives. If it isn’t, it doesn’t.
For people inside organisations
If you’re an inclusion lead or someone holding inclusion work inside an organisation right now, the budget pressure is exhausting. You may be watching things you fought for disappear. You may be having the same conversations in a loop with leaders who keep saying inclusion is a priority while reallocating its funding elsewhere.
The temptation in this environment is to defend each individual line item. To make the case for why the training program matters. Why the community partnership matters. Why the audit matters. To advocate harder.
That isn’t usually the work that produces lasting change. The work that produces lasting change is structural advocacy. Naming the pattern. Pointing out that inclusion is taking the first cut every time because it sits where the first cuts happen. Asking what would need to change for inclusion to be treated as core operating expenditure rather than discretionary spend. Asking who in the organisation has the authority to make that change, and what they would need to see to make it.
It’s slower work. It’s less visible. It doesn’t always feel like winning. But it’s the work that matters when the budgets get squeezed again next year — and they will.
For people making the decisions
If you’re a CEO, a director, a board member, or anyone holding the authority over where the cuts fall, the question is different. It’s not whether inclusion matters to you. I’m willing to assume it does, or you wouldn’t have read this far. The question is whether the architecture of your organisation reflects how much it matters.
If your inclusion strategy says inclusion is core to your purpose, but the budget treats it as a discretionary add-on, the strategy and the architecture are out of alignment. That misalignment doesn’t show up in good times. It shows up exactly now — when funding gets tight, and choices have to be made fast.
Here are three questions worth asking your finance team and your executive group this next quarter:
Where in our operating budget does disability inclusion appear, and is it categorised as operational or discretionary?
When we model budget reduction scenarios, what proportion of inclusion-related spending is the first to be reduced, and how does that compare to other categories?
If we needed to demonstrate to the board, our community, or the people we serve that inclusion is core to our work, would our budget evidence that, or would it contradict it?
These aren’t gotcha questions. They’re diagnostic ones. They tell you whether your inclusion work is structurally embedded or culturally supported. The two are not the same, and they hold up very differently under pressure.
The bigger picture
Funding cycles will tighten again. They always do. Political priorities will shift. Strategic plans will be rewritten. Leaders will turn over. The question isn’t whether your organisation will face pressure on its inclusion commitments. It will. The question is whether those commitments will hold.
They will hold if they’re structurally embedded. They won’t if they’re personality-dependent, project-funded, or culturally supported but procedurally vague.
And the test isn’t whether you announce inclusion as a priority. The test is what gets cut when no one’s watching.
Over to you
Two questions worth carrying out of this piece.
If you work inside an organisation: what got cut in your last budget — and what does that tell you about where inclusion actually sits in your organisational architecture?
If you hold decision-making authority, what would have to change in your operating budget, procurement policy, and governance frameworks for inclusion work to survive the next downturn? And what’s stopping that change from happening?
The honest answers to those questions are usually the starting point for the structural work that actually moves the dial. I’d love to hear what you’re seeing on either side.
Work With Me
This is part of the Making Inclusion Work series, written for leaders and practitioners who want their inclusion work to actually stick. If you’re thinking about your next phase of inclusion work — a DIAP, a strategy refresh, an audit, or a governance piece — and you’d like a confidential conversation about where you’re sitting and what would genuinely move you forward, I’d welcome the chat.
Services: DIAP development and review · Governance and committee reviews · Co-design and stakeholder engagement · Disability Inclusion Outcomes Framework™ · The Inclusion Lens
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