Welcome to the new look Disability Horizons!!
We’ve finally launched the new site! It has taken much hard work and time from everybody at Team DH and was only made possible with the assistance of the guys at Misfit Inc (formerly known as The Lac Project) of New York City.
Those crazy kids at Misfit Inc have created for us a marvel that joins its rightful place alongside the special list of extraordinary human accomplishments from the building of the pyramids to the development of the space shuttle! While we make such an assertion with our tongues firmly in our cheeks, we are of course truly thankful for the extraordinary work that Misfit Inc have achieved in turning our vision into a reality.
In addition to the site looking very different, we will be publishing articles on a rolling basis every Monday and Thursday and will be using our Twitter feed and Facebook page much more pro-actively. We have an ever growing base of contributors from a range of countries and backgrounds to share their story and a growing collection of travel and other useful resources. As always, we want to hear from anyone who would like to write us, and we can be easily contacted at editor@disabilityhorizons.com.
Amidst all this change, the ethos of positivity in what we are trying to achieve is the same. Some might say that such positivity is inappropriate given the doom and gloom that many disabled people around the world face due to either the direct effects of their disability or due to the difficulties that their society imposes by failing embrace even the most basic concepts of inclusivity. Moreover, we write this article in a backdrop of doom and gloom in our home city of London and across England, which has just been subject to the worst and most senseless riots and violence in recent memory.
However, doom and gloom only ever lifts away if individual sparks of optimism collectively burn brightly enough. Our platform at Disability Horizons aims to simply help put all those sparks in one place to allow them to shine brightly enough to act as a beacon of optimism which reaches far and beyond.
A journey through life is often the process of taking individual steps, whether they are upwards or unfortunately downwards. Those upward steps are the hardest, whatever they may be and often need to be powered by a sense of optimism and opportunity that exists either within or around us. For some, those next steps may be things such as starting a business, or going travelling, or taking up a new and more challenging hobby. For others, such steps may involve taking the first steps towards living independently, stepping outside their homes to socialise, or simply accessing basic human rights and needs which many people take for granted.
The beacon of optimism we wish to create on the platform of Disability Horizons will hopefully encourage anyone who reads this magazine to take that next step upwards, whatever that step may be.
In our view, if enough people take those steps forward, collectively, the image of disability will improve along with the recognition and status that all societies hold towards people with disabilities.
The writer George Bernhard Shaw famously said:
…”the reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man”…..
We want Disability Horizons to help make that much needed progress, and we therefore proudly declare ourselves to be very unreasonable indeed!
By Srin and Martyn
