And why inclusion work starts to unravel when those asks aren’t planned for.
A modern meeting room with a white rectangular table surrounded by six upholstered chairs in bright pink and green. One chair is slightly pulled back
Projects that involve disabled people are often talked about as if they’re simply “projects — but inclusive”.
In reality, they bring a lot with them.
More time. More responsibility. More complexity. More care.
And when organisations don’t acknowledge that upfront, disability inclusion work becomes fragile — not because disabled people are “hard to work with”, but because the systems around the work weren’t designed to hold what inclusion actually requires.
Inclusion isn’t just participation — it’s responsibility
When disabled people are invited into projects, it’s rarely neutral.
We’re often asked to:
- Share lived experience
- Identify barriers others haven’t noticed
- Name harm, risk, or exclusion
- Help fix problems they didn’t create
That contribution is valuable. But it also carries weight.
Projects that involve disabled people bring ethical, relational, and structural responsibilities — and those responsibilities don’t sit with individuals. They sit with the organisation.
When inclusion work ignores this, three things tend to happen.
1. The labour becomes invisible
Disabled people are often expected to “just participate” while also:
- translating their experience into something usable
- navigating inaccessible processes
- absorbing emotional or intellectual load
When that labour isn’t recognised or planned for, it becomes invisible — and invisibility is where burnout starts.
Good intentions don’t protect people from poorly designed processes.
2. Pace becomes a problem
Projects are often scoped around organisational timelines, not human ones.
In disability inclusion work, pace matters:
- time to process
- time to respond
- time to rest
- time to make sense of what’s being asked
When speed is prioritised over access, disabled people are positioned as “slowing things down”, rather than organisations recognising that the pace itself is exclusionary.
That tension is a design issue — not a personal one.
3. Support is assumed, not built
Many projects rely on an unspoken assumption:
“If something’s not working, people will tell us.”
But that assumes:
- psychological safety
- power balance
- trust
- capacity to push back
In reality, disabled people are often navigating:
- fear of being labelled difficult
- concern about future opportunities
- fatigue from having to explain the same things repeatedly
If support mechanisms aren’t built into the project, the burden falls back onto the very people inclusion is meant to centre.
What making inclusion work actually requires
Projects with disabled people bring a lot with them — and that’s not a flaw. It’s information.
It tells us what systems need to be in place before inclusion work begins.
In practice, that means:
scoping time, budget, and resources realistically
designing engagement that doesn’t rely on extraction
being explicit about roles, decision-making, and limits
building in check-ins, feedback loops, and flexibility
recognising that inclusion work affects people differently
Inclusion that lasts is rarely efficient. But it is deliberate.
This is why inclusion can’t rely on goodwill
When disability inclusion depends on:
- personal commitment
- individual champions
- people going “above and beyond”
It becomes unstable.
The moment priorities shift, staff change, or pressure increases, inclusion slips — and disabled people are often the first to feel it.
Making inclusion work means designing systems that can carry the weight of inclusion, rather than placing that weight on individuals.
A final grounding point
Projects with disabled people don’t “bring a lot with them” because disability is complicated.
They bring a lot with them because exclusion has been normalised for so long that doing things differently exposes the gaps.
That discomfort isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. It’s a signal that something important is finally being addressed.
Over to you: When disabled people are involved in projects in your organisation, what is planned for — and what is quietly left for individuals to carry?
