Milan Šveřepa, Chief Executive of Inclusion Europe, writes in Annual Report 2025.:
Wherever I went in 2025, people told me the same things: Governments are cutting funding for organisations and for services. New institutions are being opened, even in countries that did away with them decades ago. New laws make it easier to provide bad services to people with intellectual disabilities.
I’m not writing this to add to that weight. I’m writing it because I think we need to look at it honestly – and then ask what it means for us at Inclusion Europe. And also for you – the people who are this Inclusion movement.
Are we making the most of what we can offer?
The world is changing. Quickly, and not always in the direction we want. That means we need to ask ourselves: Are we adapting? Are we responding to the fact that clearly some of what we do does not have the results we want? Are we making the most of what this movement has to offer – its people, its knowledge, its experience, its resilience?
These are the questions I carry with me. I hope you carry them too – about your own organisations, about how you work, about what we might do differently. How we should work better together, as one participant at a session with European organisations at the World Congress suggested.
Work we can do together with our shared values and joined efforts
I was in Copenhagen in October 2025, to speak at a conference on independent living. I met with colleagues from our Danish member Lev and we talked – about the situation there, about what we can learn from each other, about how to make international exchange genuinely useful. Those conversations are part of what makes this movement. It’s not about the reports on policy papers – it’s about belonging. About the work we can do together with our shared values and joined efforts.
There are thousands of us in this movement who share a vision of full rights and inclusion. Who work for it in all kinds of different ways. Who struggle with everything that is going on – for people with intellectual disabilities, and in the broader political sense. But we come together in organisations, at events or in families. At local, national and European levels we make things happen every day.
Movement that already changed the world
At Inclusion Europe, 2025 was a year of good work. You can read about it in these pages – my colleagues write about it better than I could. What I want to add is this: Behind all of this work is a movement that has already changed the world. Institutions have closed. Legal capacity laws have improved. People with intellectual disabilities are living in their communities, making their own choices, doing work that matters. This movement made that happen.
Full rights and inclusion is not a pipe dream. It is a reality lived by many. It’s what gives this movement its power.
The challenges that remain are real. So is the progress we’ve made. We need to adapt and change some of our ways of working. We need to be creative and honest about what works and what doesn’t. But we do all of this while staying committed – to the mission, to each other, and to who we are.
Read the Annual Report 2025.