An evening with Sarah Stephenson-Hunter, a disability and LGBTQ+ advocate

Hear from Sarah Stephenson-Hunter. Sarah is a highly experienced and dedicated disability and LGBTQ+ advocate, campaigner, trainer and podcaster. She has over 20 years’ experience of empowering disabled people to receive the support and adjustments they require within education and employment. She currently works for the University of Oxford as their interim Head of Equality and Diversity and Staff Disability Advisor and has previously worked at the Universities of Nottingham and Birmingham. She has experience within the voluntary sector having previously worked for a national disability charity and been a trustee for a local sight loss charity and LGBTQ+ community group. Sarah brings with her a powerful combination of professional knowledge and lived experience and is an excellent communicator regularly delivering presentations to audiences in both the private and public sector. Speaking about some recent work she did for the charity Visionary, Fiona Sandford their Chief Executive said:

“We were delighted to welcome Sarah as a keynote speaker to the Visionary Annual Conference 2022. Sarah was fantastic, freely sharing her story with honesty, openness and poignancy. Delegates were “transfixed” during her speech, where she shared her experience of being trans and having a visual impairment. This enabled delegates to gain a greater understanding of some of the issues that the LGBTQ+ and disabled communities can face, and the different and meaningful ways in which we can be allies. Sarah created an environment where delegates were able to ask a range of questions with Sarah facilitating open and valuable discussion.”

The key learning objectives of the session are:

• To educate attendees on some of the everyday barriers faced by disabled people within the workplace and wider society.

• To share some lessons learned on how best to empower disabled people to “thrive” at work taking into consideration this may look different to their non-disabled counterparts.

• To illustrate to attendees the importance of taking an intersectional approach to creating an inclusive work environment.