Neuroinclusion cannot depend on someone being brave enough to ask

By Atif Choudhury, CEO, Calling All Minds

National Inclusion Week runs from 14 to 20 September, and this year’s theme, Build Trust. Navigate Change., feels especially relevant to the GAIN Together community.

Across insurance, investment and financial services, a huge amount has changed in how we talk about neurodiversity. There is more awareness, more lived experience being heard and more organisations thinking seriously about what neuroinclusive workplaces should actually look like.

GAIN has helped create a community where that learning can happen collectively, and I think that matters.

But awareness on its own does not remove a barrier.

Too often, inclusion still begins when somebody has to say that something is not working for them. They then have to decide whether to disclose something personal, find the right person to speak to and explain what they need before anything changes.

For some people that conversation may be straightforward. For others, there is real emotional labour in it, particularly when they are unsure how they will be seen or whether they will have to tell the same story again later.

I think the next stage of this work is to turn awareness into design.

That is what I mean by Anticipatory Welcome.

If we already know that people think, communicate, process information and experience workplaces differently, then we should design with more of that difference in mind before somebody has to ask us to.

This is not about predicting every individual need. It is about recognising the barriers we already know exist and asking what we can change before another person has to encounter them.

Inclusion should not depend on confidence, disclosure or somebody having enough energy to keep explaining themselves.

This is also where the social model of disability remains so useful. It shifts the focus away from what is supposedly wrong with the individual and towards what is happening around them.

The question becomes much more practical:

What is getting in the way here, and what would make participation easier?

For GAIN members, there is a particular opportunity. Many of your organisations are large and complex, with people moving between teams, managers and roles. Those transitions can become another point where somebody has to start explaining themselves again, or they can become places where access has already been thought about.

Calling All Minds has been pleased to work with GAIN because there is real power in a network of this scale learning together.

Kathryn Stringer, Chief Executive of GAIN Together, puts it like this:

“GAIN Together has always been about the power of organisations learning from one another and turning good intent into practical change. Working with Calling All Minds brings a disabled-led and intersectional perspective into that conversation, helping us think not only about how we respond to difference, but how we can design for it from the start. That feels like an important next step for our community.”

At Calling All Minds, we are a disabled-led social enterprise that brings an intersectional lens to inclusion and starts from the lived realities of the people most likely to experience barriers.

That means our starting point is rarely simply, “What condition does this person have?” We are much more interested in what is getting in the way and what would make participation easier.

Sometimes the answer can be very practical.

GAIN already uses the AXS Accessibility Toolbar on its website. Someone arriving on the site can change the way they access information without having to explain why they need to, with support across reading, focus, language and different ways of engaging with content.

As Kathryn says:

“For us, the AXS Toolbar was a simple way to make access more visible and practical on the GAIN Together website, without waiting for people to ask.”

What matters most is not the list of features, but that people have different ways into the same information without first having to explain themselves. That is Anticipatory Welcome in practice.

The same thinking sits behind the AXS Workplace Passport and the principle of Tell Us Once. Too many disabled and neurodivergent people still find themselves repeatedly explaining what gets in the way and what helps them work well, particularly when they change role, team or manager.

A barrier-first passport shifts the conversation away from diagnosis and towards what somebody actually needs to participate and do their best work. For a sector thinking seriously about neurodivergent talent, that matters because recruitment is only the beginning. People need to be able to stay, progress, contribute and belong.

If you want to see how that thinking can work in practice, you can explore the AXS Workplace Passport and the wider work of Calling All Minds.

For National Inclusion Week, let's keep the challenge simple:

If we want to build trust and navigate change, choose one place in your organisation where access still depends on somebody asking for it and see whether you can change that.

It might be your intranet, onboarding, recruitment or the way people share their access needs. It does not need to solve everything, but if GAIN members make practical changes and share what works, that learning can travel much further than any one organisation.

For me, that is where the opportunity now sits: not simply in becoming better at responding to difference, but in becoming much better at expecting it.