大象传媒

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CHRIS: What an amazing video and really tugs at my heart strings. So amazing to start this session today with such a fantastic video. Before we really kick off, I'm going to go to Sean Dilley, who is a senior journalist at the 大象传媒. You have been really involved with the creation of this video. I was hoping you could tell us a little bit about how it came about and the work that the students have been doing to get it together.

SEAN: Yes, certainly I will do. Each year we work with universities and students who are involved in particular aspects of the work that we do at the 大象传媒, as the lead for Reframing Disability at the 大象传媒 I have been very proud to work with the 50:50 team for more than a year actually, working on various projects. It ties into the work, Chris, you and I have done in partnership with The Media Trust, obviously in terms of training journalists on how to find new contributors and how to think in a more diverse way. The video is about the positive aspects of inclusion. I feel we have passed the point where we say you need to have disabled people on content, to look here are the advantages and benefits. I will say this again, everybody here go back to your teams and you can say truthfully now we have a choice to choose to do the right thing or choose to do the wrong thing. When we do the right thing, the rewards are palpable.

CHRIS: Thank you so much, fantastic way to introduce our event. Now I will introduce myself. Welcome everyone. My name is Chris Pike, I was the programme manager for the Reframing Disability programme, working between the amazing Media Trust and 大象传媒/50:50 project and we are going to hear from lots of amazing panellists today and also people from both the 大象传媒 and The Media Trust about how this project came together, the work that we have done so far and how much more there is left to do.

Before I do that, I want to go through a few bits of housekeeping. We do have the wonderful Tara with us today captioning our event. If you click live transcript at the bottom. The event is being recorded so if you have any colleagues or friends that weren't able to make it, please share it with them when that becomes available. We have our Q&A section down at the bottom and we will be talking questions for our panellists later on in the session. Do get your questions in and I will keep an eye on those. And also if you want to tweet about the event, that would be fantastic. We have two hashtags one is 50:50 project and the other is Reframing Disability. So get your tweets in and share your thoughts and responses to the discussion that we are having today. We've got lots to get through today, so I am going to go over to Su-Mei Thompson, CEO of The Media Trust. Can you tell us about why The Media Trust chose to work on this issue and how the Reframing Disability programme came together?

SU-MEI: Hello everyone. Absolutely, at Media Trust we believe that it's by giving everyone a voice that will get to a more equal society. So everything we do at Media Trust is about media representation at some level. This past year one of our key priorities has been to put disability in the spotlight, so it's no longer the Cinderella of the D&I agenda if you like. We've made a big push to tackle the under representation of disability in partnership with broadcasters like the 大象传媒, Channel 4, working closely with disability organisations like Disability Rights UK, Scope and Mind. So we decided to start with broadcast news, where disabled people are largely invisible. Although 20% of us have a disability, there are disabled experts in every walk of life, you hardly ever see a disabled person being interviewed on the news unless the story is about disability. And we think this lack of representation means important stories going unreported, disabled talent going unrecognised, and negative attitudes towards disability going unchallenged. We were lucky last year to receive government funding to run a pilot programme to reframe disability in the news. We approached the 大象传媒 because we had seen how the 大象传媒's 50:50 Project had already successfully increased women's voices across 大象传媒 news programmes. We really liked the 50:50 approach of individual programme makers, voluntarily committing to tracking the number of women appearing on programmes and making that data transparent and visible across the 大象传媒. Because we know that while top-down targets are needed in most cases, it's really bottom-up initiatives and enthusiasm at the grassroots level that will sustain positive change.

The 大象传媒 also ran audience satisfaction surveys, it was great to see satisfaction levels going through the roof. Once more women were being featured. We approached the 50:50 team to see if they would adopt the same adopt in respect of disability and we were thrilled when they said yes. So for the project, we went on a recruitment drive to find disabled potential expert contributors and we provided them with specially designed media training as well as the opportunity to network with reporters, I am delighted that we've got some of our disabled experts speaking on the panel in a minute. We also ran disability awareness training for 大象传媒 newsrooms and journalists to help them overcome biases and barriers to approaching and interviewing disabled experts. We're going to hear more about this in a minute but one thing we know at media trust if you want to crack an issue of inclusion, in a sustainable way, you need to work on both the supply side and the demand side, so disabled talent need to feel comfortable and confident to appear on TV or radio, and newsrooms and journalists need to feel comfortable and confident about working with disabled talent. So we were so overwhelmed by the calibre and diversity of talent we unearthed. One of the main things we wanted to do was to uncover more diverse disabled voices, we were really happy with the experts we trained in terms of race and ethnic diversity, sexual orientation and age and also the multiple sectors that our experts came from. When we first conceived the project it was pre-COVID. Our main goal was to leverage the power of the media to transform societal attitudes and behaviours and normalise disability. Our hope was that by showing they are disabled experts in every walk of life making positive contributions to society, that would bring home how disabled people shouldn't be defined by their disability and recognise the diverse achievements of disabled people. COVID has given our project a different and even greater urgency. We know that disabled people have felt ignored over the past year. At a time when we are seeing a huge reset of policies, the reprioritisation of funding in respect of everything from public transport to workplace safety, to investment in additional infrastructure, it's more essential than ever that disabled organisations and disabled people are being listened to. So in the spirit of building back better, I think what we've also shown with our project, which we had to deliver entirely online, is that it is possible to successfully engage disabled talent via technology if broadcasters set themselves that intention to do so. If you can create a great show during a pandemic without anyone needing to set foot in the studio, you should be able to do that once the pandemic has receded. I think we've shown broadcasters that it's relatively easy to make small accommodations, which nonetheless have a powerful and empowering effect for disabled talent. For many disabled people, particularly those with mobility issues, or anxiety, their lives have always felt a bit like they're in lockdown. We're hoping that one of the legacies of COVID is greater empathy and a more level playing field for disabled talent going forward. Thank you so much.

CHRIS: Thank you, what a fantastic introduction to the project. It was a privilege to come to work for Media Trust and work with you on the project, and one of the things that Su-Mei mentioned was about both the supply and demand side, which is why we run these two trainings in conjunction, training for journalists at the 大象传媒 and also training for disabled experts. We will be hearing from some of our disabled experts who were trained later. But first I want to hear from a 大象传媒 colleague who is going to tell us a little bit more about the training for journalists. I am delighted to welcome Sharmin Rahman who works in the 50:50 team at the 大象传媒 and I had the privilege of working with Sharmin delivering trainings at the 大象传媒 and I know that since I have finished working there, that she has been at the forefront of extending this training far and wide and making a huge impact. So Sharmin, do you want to tell us a little bit about how you got involved and what makes you so passion about it.

SHARMIN: I joined the 50:50 Project on a voluntary basis. I was passionate about the initiative and wanted to do my bit at the 大象传媒 to push for diversity. You can't be what you can't see, and I love that tag line. I'm not from a trainer background myself, but I am someone with a hidden disability. My interest goes beyond expanding my professional experience. It was being able to see and hear more people like myself in the 大象传媒. The train something aimed at journalists and content makers to give them the confidence and motivation to approach disabled contributors on their content and programmes. In the sessions we explored why under representation of disabled people in media is important. What is good and bad representation, with real-life examples, and case studies. We then talk about how to approach disabled contributors and how to go about making reasonable adjustments. So the main points are basically to listen to the individual, not to focus on someone's disability, but to ask them directly about what would make it easier for them to participate, giving them the same opportunity as everyone else. We also discuss use of language and explore what barriers journalists and content makers may face. We try and find solution toss overcome these. It's about having a conversation and using the best contributors, having diverse voices leads to better storytelling and brings in a new perspective inspiring audiences. From the sessions we have already had, we've had really positive feedback, including one programme who had a neuro typical actor play an autistic character, the programme then followed up to include an actor with autism and voices of non-speaking autistic people, we're doing ad hoc sessions for now, but the training will be rolled out by our in-house training 大象传媒 academy after the summer.

CHRIS: Amazing, thank you so much. For that intro. We've had a few questions in already in the chat and we will come to some of the questions later. I know somebody has asked how we can get involved with the 50:50 Project and I know that another one of our speakers will be telling us a little bit about that later. We've had another question about non-visible disabilities which I am really keen to be asking one of our panellists about shortly. So with that in mind, let's get started with our panellists. I would like to introduce two fantastic panellists. Unfortunately one of our panellists may be having tech issues, we will see if she is able to join us shortly. But for now, we have two fantastic panellists who are coming to us from two different perspectives. First of all we've got Darby Dorras, Executive Producer at Somethin' Else and a very experienced audio producer. He's worked across Indy productions and 大象传媒 productions and is also someone with a physical disability and founder of the disabled people in audio movement. He's really involved in the disability sphere within this world of media and broadcast, with a particular focus on audio. And Darby is one of the content makers who joined our training for journalists and content makers within the 大象传媒. I would also like to introduce Mat Campbell Hill, who has done so many things that I will not be able to introduce them all and I am sure he will tell us more about them later. But he's a non-executive director of a major government department, he's an internationally respected advisor in technology strategy and governance. He's a Paralympian. There's so much to tell you that I won't be able to do it all now, but we will be hearing from him from a different perspective and about his involvement in our training specifically for disabled experts appearing in the media. So I have got some questions which are for both of you and some questions for just one or the other. But let's get started with a question that's for both of you, which is that this has been such a difficult issue over many years. Although we are seeing really positive progress, which is fantastic, but it's been a real challenge to get the dial moving on disability representation. I am interested to hear from, I think we will go to Mat first, what do you think are the barriers that have caused problems so far in getting this moving?

MAT: The primary barrier, it starts way before media. It starts in just getting experience. So when you are doing news programmes or documentaries other anything, if you are trying to get a respected advisor on that, you need someone who has been able to do the work or has had some project experience and has done something on that. If you are disabled, the odds you have been picked up to get those little extra bits all throughout your career are lower. That is for many reasons. It could be that you don't get work experience, so when you wanted to get work experience as a 15, 16-year-old, if you are in a wheelchair or if you are deaf, or if you actually have really bad inflammatory bowel disease which means you can't do all the extra things, how easy is it for you to get some good work experience? I often think about that, back when I got work experience and wasn't disabled, but I was that typical middle class white boy, I got work experience in a computer games company. Then I went on and got other stuff. I was doing stuff. Whereas at times some of my friends, if they had basically non-standard English names, what did they get? The girls, my female friends who were so much brighter than I ever could be, but they were sat on reception and that's what they did. I got to do stuff. As that tracks through with work and being disabled, it's those, like the equivalent of micro-aggressions, it's the micro missing out, so you don't get that little extra chance to do that extra project, and those are things which take people up. So you really have to push. The other part of that is something that I recognise a lot in the work I have done with women and helping them to move into senior board roles, is they always have to overachieve. They have to overachieve to be recognised for doing what they're doing. That just means things like in a review around in the USA of senior people in academia with disability, it's less than 2.5%. The numbers are just lower all the way through. That makes it really difficult when actually we represent 20% of the population. There's a disconnect we've got to find there.

CHRIS: Thank you, I think one thing you said that resonated with me is that one of the biggest challenges is it's often on the micro level, so many of the barriers are things that are really hard to quantify or stick a pin in, and on their own they sound like they're not that big a deal but when they all build up together it can make things really challenging. I will go to Darby now with the same question.

DARBY: Sure, I think that a lot of it stems specifically with the media with a lack of proper engagement really, with disabled people and disabled issues. Really understanding disabled perspectives and disabled experiences. And that lack of knowledge can lead to all sorts of things. But I think that for lots of people, I think that the group of disabled people are the largest minority group in the world, but it's incredibly nuanced, that my experience and Mat's experience and four people you could line up next to us would be wildly different. I think that that can be often because of a lack of knowledge and a lack of education, a lack of engagement, it can be impenetrable for people and talking from my perspective, which is behind the mic as a programme maker it can lead to all sorts of challenges but can lead to things like just stereotyping obviously, using the same small group of people to speak about issues of disability, and they never speak about anything else, they just talk about issues of disability and they are the same small group of people. From a programme makers perspective that then leads down a very narrow street which gets more and more narrow. So I think that there are huge amounts of barriers and I think that my message in general around all of this conversation is its granular detail that we have to get into here. Because trying to have a sweeping approach to solve it or presume it will be done in the next 12 months is problematic for all sorts of reasons, but certainly because of the kind of nuance of the world of disability.

CHRIS: Darby you lead me nicely into my next question for both of you, which is this is not something that's going to be resolved overnight or in 12 months, but what do you think are the key things that we need to be doing in order to be moving the dial here? And you are welcome to say things which aren't part of the Reframing Disability programme or things that are. Darby first this time.

DARBY: I think it's about proper engagement. One of the speakers earlier touched on the importance of it at every level. So I think that commissioners especially at that, but down to assistant producer level, some of this is where the reframing disability training can be really useful, need to engage and they need help. Actually my experience of having done the training myself was, yeah, it comes back to the point yes I have a disability but that doesn't mean I understand anything about 100 other disabilities. I found it really useful, because having a dialogue around disabilities and specifically someone's disability can be really challenging. Often a lot of stuff that is said that's well intentioned can be really problematic. So I think that education is really, really important, training, not just the training we are talking about here but more widely I think is really, really important. But it does need people to embrace it. This stuff we've got momentum at the moment, it feels like there's a conversation that's happening. That's great. It's not going away. It's definitely going one way here. The sooner that people realise that across the industry and realise that actually if we work together as an industry here, we're going to affect positive change but that will impact much more widely than just the 大象传媒 or Sky or Capital Radio.

CHRIS: Thank you, a really strong message of hope, it is moving slowly but surely in the right direction and with no sign of turning back. I will go over to Mat now.

MAT: I think that the idea of inclusion has often been painted as that snowflake comment, and that essentially people have to go out of their way and things are worse for being inclusive. But actually when you start doing things inclusively it's more often than not a better outcome. So when I was working with NICE, that's not, as a disabled people, that was doing my wider work, we looked at the language we used to talk about medical devices, I reviewed 300 medical devices over ten years with NICE and a big thing we did with the language was to everything should be explained about the whole big stack of paper you are about to read about that medical device should be covered in the first three to five lines, which was readable and comprehensible by the average 12-year-old girl. The average 12-year-old girl is far better than a 12-year-old boy at being able to concentrate, but it aimed it at a level of comprehension where the vast majority of the community in the UK can read it and understand it and you can infer words you may not understand. What that does, if you tie that into every part of your work and I do this a lot with my non-executive work and other parts, if you set your projects with a real clear statement and you are saying we are pitching it at this audience, you are not dumbing it down, you are making sure everyone understands and you are making sure everyone is at the right starting position and then you build it up. How to do that with this? I think in a way what that text does is it overrepresents, it overexplains it in a very clear way, and I think we do have to have it being more visible for people within media, so you have that aspiration to go and do it. So probably the one biggest barrier is a lack of aspiration and what are people told that they're not going to do. I am dyslexic and I have ADHD and fun things anyway and we didn't know that when I was a teen, I was a bit annoying to my teachers, but I can remember what I was told, I was going to be, I had a choice, my careers programme that we did on the 大象传媒, it said I had a choice of fence post erector and public refuse I think it was. Those were my two choices, that was just what is the point of listening to the programme. If you are disabled, your aspiration get knocked down time and time again, until you get to the point of saying this is what I'm going to go for, because that is what I am being told I should go for. I will end of this one thing - a few years ago I was really fortunate to be able to work as a youth mental health worker. That was when I really started understanding about aspirational poverty and that is I think, in the UK, is probably one of the most difficult poverties that people don't recognise it. What does that look like? Well I had this great young lad who was about 12 and he lived four miles from one of the best beaches in this country. He always lived there. His entire family lived on the same estate. He had never been to the beach, he wasn't disabled, he had never been to the beach because they had never seen the point in going there. We were trying to help him have an aspiration to prepare for his GCSEs and A-levels. Why would I even do that. It's not I don't want to do things, it's just I've never had any experience that would tell me that the beach is a good place to go to. So is that as a disabled person I just watch TV nothing on there that, any drips and drabs that give me that idea that it's attainable or a good thing, then why am I going to go and do it.

CHRIS: That reflects so strongly with me as an autistic professional, working in media and before I was working in the media, the importance of those disabled role models and people who tell you, show you what potential you might have. It's so, so key. And so important. I'm going to now ask some questions that are specific to one or the other of you. Do remember to get those questions in in the Q&A section. We've got a question for Mat which I will go to after that. First of all I want to go to Darby. I'm really pleased Darby could join us today. Darby and I have been working together for a few months and it's an interesting situation because Darby attended a 大象传媒 training for content makers and then approached, he approached us about bringing that session into something else into his production company, which we did, one session so far, and I think it's been interesting to see how the training has adapted between 大象传媒 and the Indies but also I am really interested to hear from you Darby, what made you want to bring the training into something else, what did you feel you got from it, what do you think the reaction from the team has been so far, how has it been useful within a much smaller organisation than the 大象传媒.

DARBY: I touched on the fact that I think that for me personally, I was looking at ways we might bring in other training and strategy around issues of disability widely for our teams and this training came up. I did it myself, and I found it, I touched on this, but I found it personally useful in terms of thinking, just stopping for a moment, taking stock and thinking about how to, more than anything who I got from it, how to engage with people with their disabilities, in a way that would be comfortable for them and be productive. I found that particularly useful. There was an interesting mix of people on the training course I did as attendees. So it was specific at that point very much to news and to journalism. But I could immediately see that translating to what we do, we are a production company, we make audio and TV, we make social media, a huge range of stuff, but ultimately it's content production, and at some point in that process people are finding voices and doing something with them, whether that's visual or only audio for through social media. So I can immediately see it would translate to just wider learnings for the people in content production, so we had looked at so. Case studies we were use and how we could make it more hands on applicable. And I think that I touched on this as well, but the thing that it does is reassure people and enabled them to open up conversations that they may otherwise swerve because they are unsure about how to do it. They are unsure about the dialogue they might need to have, and they are concerned that if they get it wrong, it could be problematic, because it causes offence to that person or it could be problematic because they have made a horrendous faux pas that leads to something further down the road. Anyone's instinct is therefore to go the easier route, so that is to pick up the phone or whatever, but to someone who isn't disabled often. That's the gist. So we rolled it out with some people and found it really, really useful. We had different feedback from different teams, but I know within a week or a couple of weeks of people having done it, it was directly impacting on programme making that comes out of our business. We are a huge supplier to 大象传媒 audio, weekly strands and programmes as well as all sorts of other things and podcasts, but just to touch on one story that came through from a programme maker which was on Five Live's Kermode and Mayo programme which lots of people listening to this will know about, and they were talking about Sears film Music which I am sure you know about, but takes its subject a non-speaking autistic girl who is played by a neuro typical actor and the treatment of that on air was directly impacted by the training that we carried out and how to beyond the initial review respond to that on air and which voices to feature as part of that analysis and criticism. I won't go into all the details, but that was one example of the way that very quickly people can take it and apply it, which is why I wanted to roll it out. I think to be frank about it as well, it's not perfect. I'm sure we would all admit. You and I learnt from it and we run another session we can do it differently but and there are things we can tailor but my point it, it comes back to what I said earlier, the fact that for this to actually change widely across the media, everybody needs to engage, and as you say whether it is the 大象传媒 or a company like ours which is a big audio production companies or whether it's run by two people, everybody has a way to engage and there's lessons we can learn from this sort of training that I think are really widely applicable, than just news and current affairs.

CHRIS: Brilliant, thank you. I totally agree. I think for me as the deliverer of the training, what I always say is that the goal of the training isn't to give people every bit of information on disability and that would be impossible even if we had a whole week, but the goal is in that two to two-and-a-half hour session to get the conversation going and get people thinking about it, and when people are doing that, that's when I feel really satisfied with the training. I have had people come to the training before who when they arrive and I say what brings you here, they say my boss told me to come. And then by the end of the session they are saying that was really interesting, I want to apply that in my work and that for me is where it really feels like it's having impact, not necessarily, although it's fantastic to have people who are a bit more of an advanced level, but I feel like where it has the most impact is introducing people to the topic and getting them to is think about it for the first time, it's really fantastic. Brilliant. Thank you Darby. We have heard about the training for content makers, from Sharmin and Darby and I'm going to go over to Mat who is one of our first five disabled experts trained in media interviews. Before we go into the specific question that was in the Q&A, can I ask you how you found the training and why do you think that that kind of training, whether it's that programme or generally having media interview training available for disabled experts, tailored to disabled experts is important.

MAT: I think on a really basic level, what was great is to meet like-minded, like-bodied, like-neuro atypical people, whatever, but being able to be in an environment where you have another load of experts who aren't there to talk about disability, and as that's come up a few times already today. That's really important. The fact they are disabled is supplementary to the fact that they have all built careers, successful careers in something. So that's great. The other part from my personal point of view, funnily enough many years ago I had spent some time in TV, and I had been a very mediocre assistant sound engineer, but I loved doing it, and then after my injury I did work for a short time with 大象传媒 Radio Cornwall. But on the other side of the boom. Being able to actually sit down and think about my own skill sets and how I respond to others and their questioning was really helpful despite how verbose I still am now, I was even worse before the training, so it was really helpful to sit there and be asked to prepare short statements and then get taken offline, not offline, off subject and have professional journalists trying to bully you out of saying what you want to say. That's really helpful. I think we are still at this point where if the disability comes up, if people know you are disabled, then you do feel this sort of pressure that I'm representing something else here as well, other than just talking about what I specialise in. There's a bit of pressure on you. You don't want to have anyone using something against you, which is nothing that you can control and using that as an excuse to not use anyone else. Quizzing me about technology, medical technology, anything like that and then thinking he didn't know what he was talking about, we won't use him again, people saying he was wrong or other academics saying that, that's fine, but if it's a case of yeah, back off this chap, disabled people don't cut it in the meetings, we will start phasing it out, that is where we feel that little extra pressure on, it probably doesn't exist but it's always going to be there.

CHRIS: One thing I noticed with our training compared to a standard media interview training, the biggest difference was just taking more time to tell people about the interview process, because I think a lot of media interview training, they just tell you how to be good on camera, but they don't tell you anything that leads up to that, or anything that comes after that. That is a big question for a lot of people, which was really important. We've had a question from Sarah in the chat, which is about the work being done around non-visible disability. In our disabled experts training, which was run over six different sessions, Mat won't have met everyone participating, but we had a good mix in that regard, but it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on what barriers might be there and what we can do to make sure that we're bringing all disabilities in?

MAT: I think first of all, depending on what content you are making, it will be more relevant than others, but people with different experiences and whether it's a disability and if it's hidden, often get quite good at problem solving. If you have a chronic condition or if you are neuro atypical or if you had depression there are going to be parts of the things you understand or ways you see things that others won't. So asking that question when you are doing some work and you are with your team, saying is there anything I have missed but really rather than just chucking it out there and expecting no-one to answer, really push on that, anything anyone's got. And then you will encourage those who do have neuro atypical experience to say actually I think we could just look at it like this. What you don't want to do is feel like you are going to have sit down with every person and ask them about their mental health and every single part because that's not what it is about. But you can talk about it. So you can say I saw this about depression, I thought it was really interesting. I guarantee you, every single one out there knows someone who has considered suicide. I guarantee you. You may even know people who have sadly been successful with a suicide attempt. There's the depression. You all have experience of that. You have experience of again, a lot of other physical illnesses may be hidden. The neuro typical part again, you will know people, but if we don't talk about it, it's not about questioning, it's not about me saying Chris, tell me how autism affects you, it is just saying this is interesting, what do we think about that, what does that look like, how would that be seen. That starts the conversation and gives people the space. Funnily enough, although I'm a wheelchair user and I do walk short distances with sticks, when we talk at work about disability and things like that, I talk my mental health and I talk about neuro diversity. Because they are the ones that people don't want to talk about most, and B, because they effect the most people. It's just talking about it of more and saying we understand and recognise it and understand it is an issue for people, come and talk to us, and I think start there, start the conversations but don't make them personal.

CHRIS: Fantastic. Thank you so much. We're going to move into questions very shortly and so do get your questions into the Q&A box. Just to be clear with the Q&A, we are happy to take questions for Mat and Darby and also from the people you heard before Sharmin and Sean and Nina who will be going to finally for questions about 50:50, one of which we already had in. Before we go to our Q&A, I want to ask one final question to both Mat and Darby in one or two sentences. We have content makers listening here, hopefully we will have even more content makers watching the recording back. What's the key message you would want to send to them on this issue of disability representation, what is the thing you want them to know? I will go to Darby first.

DARBY: So I think the main thing is take these conversations that are ongoing as a starting point. There are lots of people out there that can help, that's the thing to take away. Finding those training programmes like this, finding conversations you can have, the group that I set up is disabled people in audio.com, it's a massive growing community of people who work in audio, in some way and have a disability. The idea of that is not only to provide a resource for people with disabilities in audio and to have conversations and dialogue in a safe space but it's also there for them to have direct conversations with people in the industry because we can help. You want to find disabled talent we can have a conversation. You want some guidance, or you have a really helpful suggestion about how we might further this conversation in the industry, let's have a conversation. I'm not the only one in the group, there's lots going on. You've just got to get out and find the people that will help you with the kind of content you are making and then engage. Engage is the word. Sit up, use us as a starting pistol.

CHRIS: You are absolutely right. There's so much expertise and knowledge within the industry, that's something I have discovered from working on this programme and seeking that is so important.

MAT: I am trying to answer it from a different angle and perhaps go down the corporate business angle. Making media, my understanding of it, if I am wrong, people buy into and want to watch want to engage and listen to things where it is aspirational and where they can recognise themselves as a part of that. So either they recognise representations themselves or their groups, or that they could aspire to become. So just thinking very briefly about the figures, if you take a population, 100% of the population, we know that about 27% of the current UK population has a degree, so we're only going to use them at the moment, when we are talking about specialists, it's only really people with higher education. You have already cut yourself down to 27% of people. Well, we know that 20% are disabled. If we're not really using disabled people, therefore we are only using 80% of that 27%, it's around 22% of the population we're down to. Hang on, 51% of the population is women, so we are already down to 10 or 11%. But hang on, I think 13, 15% are BAME, so what are you actually using? You are only using about 9%, you are only representing 9% of the population if you are using the standard approach of the middle-class white man and then just think about layer those on and building that up. If you want to be representative and engage more viewers more listeners, then pull those bits in rather than just getting stuck. It's that over and over again we have been encouraged, when we talk about diversity, we always think about these small groups, small group here, it's a small group here, it's a small group here, but it's not. The smallest group is the group that does the best and that is the neuro typical middle class white man, who is not disabled. Pretty much the smallest group.

CHRIS: Thank you so much. I'm going to go to questions from the audience now. Really interesting question, which I'm going to open up, so anybody who has spoken or will be speaking please do come in if you think it's relevant to you. I have worked in the 大象传媒 for over 20 years and only just been open about my non-visible disability how do we make more people comfortable about being open about it, the 大象传媒 may have more disabled people than they think.

SEAN: I can have a go at that one. The 大象传媒 is saying you should be comfortable to be yourself at work. The thing is if you are not comfortable in bringing your true authentic self to work you are fitting into the narrow box of whatever a 大象传媒 person is supposed to be, I'm now about four years into the 大象传媒 and a lot of my experience comes from the commercial sector. My observations have definitely been in those four years that everybody's background and I would say frame of reference is different, so please, please, please, be free and willing to speak on the most recent survey there's a question in terms of whether somebody has a disability and as we cover in the training, you are considered disabled if you have a long-term health condition or disability lasting for more than a year, there are some diagnosis that would account in addition. And it has a significant impact on your daily duties. Only declare it if it applies to you but it may apply to more people than the 大象传媒 is aware of. So please consider that does it last more than a year, does it have a substantial effect on your life.

CHRIS: Thank you so much Sean. We've also had another question. How can people from outside the 大象传媒 get involved in this work and make this difference? I'm very shortly going to go to the brilliant Nina Goswami who will tell us about 50:50 and the work that she does, and creative diversity team does at the 大象传媒. As well as being involved with 50:50 you can get involved with The Media Trust work and get in touch with Media Trust on their website, there's a form you can fill in and get in touch with them. And as a former Media Trust colleague and a continued immediate why trust freelance trainer, I will toot my own horn as well as the one the horns of all my colleagues when I say we do amazing work. But the other person and the other team that does absolutely amazing work is the 50:50 Project and so I would like to go to Nina. We've had the question how can we get involved with the 50:50 Project, and also just tell us about your involvement in the project and what the next steps are really, what's coming next?

NINA: Absolutely. Thank you so much. It's been such a fascinating session, it's really great to hear from everyone and what I love about these things is that you feel the passion of what we have been culminating in over the last few months and that's fantastic to see. Before I go on to where we go next and a bit about 50:50 I want to pick up on the question in regard to being yourself at the 大象传媒, and I agree with Sean absolutely. We all need to try and make sure that we're speaking up and that we do bring ourselves to the 大象传媒. At the end of the day we can't create diverse content that really reflects our audiences if we're not giving our own voice to what we're doing. If we end up going through one particular prism because we think that's the one that's going to get us where we need to go in our career, then we're not doing the right thing for our audiences. So if you are there and well done firstly for actually speaking up about your non-visible disability in the first place but keep doing that, and the more people who do that, the more likely we are to see others emulate that. As Sharmin said earlier, you can only be what you can see. We need to be vocal, and we need to be expressing our own opinions and thoughts about particular things from our different opinions and perspectives and that is the way that we will enrich our content to ensure that what we're doing is right for our audiences. Also what's right for us as staff at the 大象传媒. Because we as a workforce need to be able to understand each other and we can't do that if we don't hear from our colleagues. I wanted to add that in there. I could bore you with loads of 大象传媒 initiatives and things like that that we're doing to help diversify our workforce, but I will leave that for another day. Because we are here to talk about reframing disability and the 50:50 Project. Just on the 50:50 Project, how do you get involved. Please do, that would be fantastic. If you are outside the 大象传媒 then please go to 大象传媒.com/50:50, there's lots of information on there about how it works. At its heart, it is a Data monitoring tool, which we use to understand what content looks like and then we try and increase representation by identifying gaps in our particular voices that we are using in our content and then going and finding those voices essentially and that is what Reframing Disability really filtered into. We have been using 50:50 to understand what our women representation looked like and as we have seen it is that we have been increasing that representation across the board. On Thursday we've got our next report out which will show hopefully, I'm not going to give anything away, what our progress has been since then. And as I say, Reframing Disability has played a really major part in that for us, because in October we announced how 50:50 is now moving beyond gender to monitor ethnicity and disability representation, still having three key core principles at the heart of T data to effect change, count what we can control and making sure we never compromise on quality and the best contributors always take part. So the supply demand side of things, we need to make sure we are getting the best disabled contributors on air and that is where the expert training came in from Reframing Disability. But we need to make sure our journalists and content makers are well understanding of what they may need to do as a result of that and that is where the journalism and content maker training came in that we have Sean leading the work on. So what next. I have only got two minutes to talk you through this. But before I do that, I just want to say how Reframing Disability has really been a passion and dedication from across The Media Trust and across the 大象传媒 and without so many people we wouldn't be here today. That's our very much thanks to Su-Mei and Media Trust for coming up with the idea and approaching us and also to other organisations as W we had the Reframing Disability advisory group, which was made up of disability charities and other media organisations, so thank you to you. Together we came up with this idea. But of course this idea wouldn't have happened if we didn't have any funding, so many thanks to nester and DCMS for funding this project to this point so far. No programme would run without its core team. So Chris, thank you for being the programme manager, Sean for leading the training alongside Sharmin and also our 50:50 Project lead at the 大象传媒 Lara, without you this would not be happening, so kudos to you all. In my - I have literally run out of time I have realised, but I hope you can hang on as I explain what's next. I talked about 50:50, disability monitoring, we are rolling that out across the BC. More than 220 teams are taking part in disability and ethnicity monitoring. We will be reporting on that this time next year. We will be ensuring that that training is rolled out with Sean Dilley leading the way in terms of that. We are looking for more people to join the 大象传媒's 50:50 new voices database which you can find more information at on our website at 大象传媒.com/50:50 and please do sign up. We need as many experts to be widening that pool as possible. We are looking at what is the next stage for Reframing Disability and Su-Mei and I are not resting on our laurels and we are putting applications for the next face of funding as unfortunately our funding with nester has run out. But if anyone has any thoughts on that front, please do get in touch because we are looking to continue to the next level with this project. And as a final quick word I want to say thank you so much to everyone for coming together today. It is with your support and your continued support that we will make sure that our content is better reflective of our world. Thank you and to back to Chris.

CHRIS: Thank you Nina and thank you to everyone who hung on and you will be able to catch the recording soon. Amazing, brilliant thoughts from all of our, everyone who joined us today, thank you so much. Thank you to Katie at Media Trust and Vanessa and Rob for organising this. Thank you to Tara for our captioning. And just please get involved. Please remember what we have been talking about today and if I were to leave you with one final message it would be this. I am autistic and I don't in many ways fit the stereotype. When I tell people I am autistic I worry what is going to happen is they think I am lying or making it up because I don't fit the stereotype. But 90% of the time is what happens is I change people's perspectives and people start to rethink what they thought they knew. Every one individual who changes their mind adds up to a huge change in societal attitudes and so I really encourage everyone to get involved in whatever way they are comfortable with this work because it really makes a difference even at that micro level. Thank you so much to Nina and to everyone and do look out for the recording and share it with your colleagues. Thank you and goodbye.