By Milan Šveřepa.
“I’m stealing this idea from you”, I told self-advocates and colleagues during a training in Brussels couple of weeks back. They laughed. I meant it.
We were two days into a training with participants from eight countries. The topic of my session was communication: how do you take what matters to you and say it in a way that reaches people who don’t already agree with you?
People worked on their messages. About deinstitutionalisation. Legal capacity. Personal assistance. And they did something that is harder than it sounds – they dropped the jargon (using every-day words instead), added their emotion, and put a real person at the centre. Then they gave each other honest, good feedback. The kind you only give when you feel safe enough to mean it.
That’s what I want to talk about in this edition of Belonging with Inclusion Europe. Not the training’s content, but what being in that room actually means.
Advocating for rights and inclusion can feel lonely sometimes. You face many obstacles and many people and organisations who disagree or outright refuse to listen. You fight for the same things year after year, day after day. You face bad decisions made by people who are in positions where they should’ve known better. It’s a tough going.
And then you walk into a room like that one we had during the training. There are people who come from different countries but who are fighting the same fights, feeling the same frustrations… Sharing the same vision, walking the same paths. Finding the same things funny.
You can stop explaining yourself: Just talk, listen, work together. That’s the beauty and value of coming together in meetings, conferences… across a movement such as ours.
And after, it’s important to bring that energy, that experience, that know-how to the world outside of our rooms. The whole point of the training and all the work we do is to take the messages out to the people who haven’t heard them yet. That’s why I was stealing some of the ideas from the training participants – it’ll be great to share them with everyone. To use them in our advocacy for full rights and inclusion.
Thank you everyone who came together for that week in Brussels. It was great work, and good fun.
Next opportunity to get together and enjoy similar – much stronger! – energy is the Europe in Action conference in Vicenza. Three days. Hundreds of people from all over Europe. One shared vision. More on that: Together to advance inclusion The EPSA Steering Group met in person in Brussels for the first time in over a year. László Bercse, Oswald Föllerer, Andreas Zehetner, Ana Martínez, and newly elected Ellis Jongerius are self-advocates leading EPSA’s work at European level. They spent two days planning and having honest conversations about visibility of self-advocacy work: not more reports, but making the work real and visible as it happens. After more than a year of screens, being in the same room mattered.
Soufiane El Amrani and Camille Latimier head to Cyprus to talk about support in decision-making. They are both speakers at a conference organised by the Cyprus Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
Soufiane will then continue his programme in Cyprus with the EDF General Assembly, where he is nominated for elections to their Board.
Contribute to European policies
EU Study on Equal Treatment in Housing: The European Commission is conducting an EU‑wide study on housing. It will focus on affordability, adequacy, discrimination, segregation and exclusion. The Commission is looking for input from persons with disabilities. Consultations will take place between May and July 2026, and interested participants are encouraged to register by Friday 8 May.
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