In conversation with: Pete Donnelly – building innovation through lived experience of disability

Over time he steadily pieced his life back together. Wheelchair skills, he rapidly realised, were essential for recovery – and wider social familiarisation. While the disabled community is eye-wateringly diverse, “it’s important to recognise we are not talking about a small group of people, or how we perceive disabled people to look.”

He goes on: “If you start thinking about disability as a type of social structure [then] we can recognise the barriers are what stop people from engaging in any part of life.”

Pete founded The Wheelchair Skills College in 2021 to help pass on every-day skills – from carrying a coffee to getting up and down kerbs. More recently, his Churchill Fellowship helped him fund travel – he’s a passionate explorer – to Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand to learn how the disabled community build on their lived experience for greater social impact.

Funding for needed home adaptation equipment in Australia, he discovered, is distributed via a National Disability Insurance Scheme “which brings together various pots of money and gives disabled people more autonomy over how this is spent”.

In the UK, around 25% of the population, Pete points out, is disabled. If this massive community were given more meaningful control over the products and services they use, an eco-system of creativity and progress would surely thrive.

His Fellowship report, Building Innovation Through Lived Experience of Disability, is essentially a blueprint for overcoming innovation frustration. Let disabled innovators pilot their own path – but support them too while doing it.

Innovation, he says with some frustration, is too often talked about in terms of tech. “But I think we need to promote that ideas we have from our lived experience can be used for social change. I think that’s more effective. If you overly focus on tech, for example, then you’re going to be inhibiting so much potential for development.”

The disabled community has serious spending muscle. “The spending power of the disabled UK community is valued at £274 million a year,” says Pete, despite unfairly higher day-to-day costs.

So, did the Fellowship help him re-set goals for The Wheelchair Skills College? “I need [now] to influence system change from within,” he replies, “building credibility and speaking the same language as decision makers”.

“I feel that the next step for me is to research further into community-based wheelchair skills training to build a more robust evidence case, and I am planning to undertake a PhD to do this.”

Now living in London, Pete remains an optimist, though he’s also a realist. “I think the [new] government could make some fast changes. I think support organisations could roll out programmes that offer disabled innovators new opportunities very quickly, so we can start talking about innovation in a different way.”

While some disabled innovators may choose to use their ideas to support their local community “and make extra money as a side hustle,” he goes on, “other people will be more market-orientated – there are so many sub-groups”.

He’s undertaken several tough trips, from travelling overland from Bangladesh to the UK using buses, trains and boats to driving to Mongolia as one third of an all-wheelchair user team. Travel experiences have continually tested his resilience, wheelchair skills and other people’s perceptions about what’s possible.

What was his most memorable Fellowship learning experience? Connecting with other innovators he says “and realising I am part of a global community felt both reassuring and heartening. Hearing from people from very different backgrounds at different stages of their innovation journey who were all aiming for different goals gave me an appreciation of how substantial this group is.”