Earlier this week I was in a workshop to learn, share, discuss disability rights and policies in the EU, with special attention to deinstitutionalisation.

The message I brought was quite simple: Policies matter, and they have direct impact on people.

It can take (scratch that – it takes) many years.
It can be hard to see.
(And for those reasons it may be hard to believe.)

But yes, EU policies do have direct impact on people.

The obvious example, and the topic I was invited to speak about, is deinstitutionalisation:

📊 It was the 2007 DECLOC study (.pdf) on deinstitutionalisation, and the 2009 Špidla Report (.pdf) which effectively established institutionalisation as an EU issue.
(Both, of course, preceded and supported by years of work and activism of various people and organisations.)

💡 Followed by the 2012 EEG Guidelines for countries around Europe on what the issue is and how to tackle it.

💼 Many trainings, projects, years later, there are thousands of people with disabilities (and children, too) who have much better lives because of it.
They are no longer in large institutions.
They have new places to live, new friends, new jobs.
Better support.

The problem with all this? There’s no systematic evidence.
The governments cannot be bothered collecting, presenting, evaluating relevant data. (Yes, we are talking public money here.)
And it’s not realistic to expect NGOs to step in and monitor all that would need to be monitored.
So you can choose to believe or dispute my claims.

But that’s not why I’m writing this – I’m writing it because the workshop made me think about how hard it is to make a case for change – to motivate those involved in the change – when there’s so much distance between the policy and its impact.

We need better information (ns, Sherlock) and better story-telling.

We need to demonstrate that when people do what we asked for (change policies, invest money) it leads to the results we wanted (less people in institutions, better lives).

It may (scratch that – it will) take many years.
And it may be hard to see.

But that’s exactly why we need to do it.
We need to be able to come to the table and show the fruits of peoples’ labour.
Those who planted the original trees may be long gone, but in the room are others, and their job is to take care of those trees and to plant new ones.

And to do all that while being several policy cycles and layers of governance removed from the fruit-bearing branches.
Let’s help them a little, showing that yes, policies do have direct impact on people.

🍏 An apple a day keeps bad policy away. 🍎