Flourishing lives

Reflections on disability justice, power, and co-production from GLE 2026

This Substack is coming to you from Ottawa, Canada, where I’ve spent the past week attending the GLE 2026 Leadership Exchange. It’s my first GLE event, my first time in Canada, and my first properly international conference (I say properly because I’ve been to a few Trans-Tasman events over the years, but never further afield or with an international focus).

Since Covid, international travel has increasingly been framed as a ‘luxury’, or an unnecessary frivolity, particularly in the not-for-profit sector. After this week, I would now hard disagree! The exchange of ideas has been incredibly useful - hearing what people are doing in other countries, sharing what we do here, recognising that many of us are facing the same challenges - and having a chance, after a fairly brutal few years, to breathe, to talk freely with others (both from here and from other places), and to come away feeling a little more connected and a little more able to do this.

To that end, here is a noncomprehensive list, in no particular order, of my current top takeaways from the past week.

Standard touristy photo in front of the Ottawa sign. Amusingly, I approached the sign from behind and it took me longer than I care to admit to realised what AWATTO stood for.

The Nova Scotia Remedy

The Nova Scotia Human Rights Remedy is a five-year, legally binding agreement that guides government’s work to transform the disability support system in Nova Scotia. Colloquially known as ‘the remedy’, it is what the government must do (in response to a Human Rights case and order) to address discrimination against people with disabilities (in the province of Nova Scotia).

It was great hearing about what they are doing - and also heartbreaking as New Zealand started something like this, with the Enabling Good Lives model, and then got cold feet and stopped. Now even that progress is being eroded.

My takeaway: you need a range of evidentiary material, across a range of domains, to keep making arguments for what works (especially if what works is radically different to existing systems and practice). If there isn’t a court order or government commitment, you will need steady, loud, organised advocacy from across the sector to keep the pressure on and momentum going - plus the aforementioned range of evidence to continually make the argument across a range of areas.

Systems, and the people in them, revert back

Systems, and those working within them, will tend to revert back or default to the ‘old’ ways of working. Change means regularly pushing forward and moving others along in their thinking and practice. It also means going back when systems revert, and pushing again, explaining again, and carrying others forward (again).

My takeaway: It’s going to feel like you’re constantly repeating yourself, but having these continuous conversations, with individuals, repeatedly, is needed.

A gentle cruise down the Rideau Canal. Another history of stolen lands, people working in unsafe conditions (many died), and the gentle glossing over of it all.

Shallow information gathering leads to poor solutions

Policy and data sets are incomplete on their own. You need the living experiences of those whose lives are being impacted. Similarly, professional, academic, and institutional knowledge is also incomplete if it does not sit alongside living expertise or on-the-ground realities.

Ministerial Advisory Groups are an extremely shallow way to gather information. You can end up with a collection of individuals who do not necessarily have a constituency that they represent, who do not have any accountability for their words, and who may not have a wider commitment to (or understanding of) disability rights.

Power must move

Governments, providers, and organisations are getting better at listening to the community, at engaging with disabled people and families, and at holding feedback sessions in accessible ways. Yet decisions are still made by people in positions of power who do not have living experience. We need more than better engagement and warmer language!

Co-production means that people with living experience:

• Define the problem

• Shape the solution

• Share what works

• Are resourced to implement solutions

• Evaluate and adjust

This moves people to being partners, and makes co-production and power sharing structural (instead of symbolic). It also helps prevent money being spent on solutions that people don’t need.

My homework: Read these resources on co-production

Build relational networks

It’s not just New Zealand that has a fractured disability sector! Underfunding, a lack of understanding, and the successive failure to invest in families early has resulted in poor outcomes across the board. We end up fighting each other for scraps and it is hard to lift our heads up and connect. It also means we end up blaming and hurting each other. It’s not just a New Zealand thing - the colonial project runs deep and our countries are all grappling with the long tail of harm from this.

Building relational networks, where we support each other and take collective action, is one way of recalibrating this. As part of this, it is necessary to do the work together to unpack assumptions about individualised models, our inherited ideas of who matters, and economic notions of ‘productivity’.

My thought to ponder: Ask braver questions of myself, of others, and of organisations. Are my relational networks leading to transformational change and collective action? How would I know?

Language matters

People will replicate the dehumanising language of the system - learning to steadily and consistently push back on language is an important act of resistance.

“We are not ‘complex needs’ we are human beings that live complex lives” - Dr Clendon Farquhason, GLE 2026

Using language like citizenship, partnership, belonging, and thriving shifts the conversation and thinking in subtle but important ways. We want disabled people and families to thrive. We want us all to have the full rights of citizenship and belonging. We work in partnership with each other.

My thinking shift: This government has steadily eroded our collective humanity and used language that is dehumanising and harms us all. I want a thriving, full life for all my children, not just an existence. I utterly reject the Minster’s assertion that an everyday life, where only one’s basic needs are met, is all we can aspire to. I aspire for more than a neglect-free, abuse-free life. I aspire to a thriving and flourishing life for all.

I visited the Ottawa Art Gallery, which had an exhibition by Leah Decter. Her work grapples with what it means to unpack embedded settler colonialism and imagine new and different ways of being.