My Story

Abstract

This chapter is Stevie’s story about her life as a disabled child in England. Stevie is five years old and lives with her family in a city suburb in the North-West of the country. Stevie originally told her story as part of a research project that one of the editors of this book, Katherine, was carrying out at the Research Institute for Health and Social Change at Manchester Metropolitan University with Scope, the UK disability charity, called Resilience in the lives of disabled people across the life-course carried out between September 2011 and July 2012 in England. The project had a number of aims:

• to explore what resilience means to disabled people at different stages across the life course;

• to explore how resilience, or a lack of it, has affected disabled people’s ability to negotiate challenges and make the most of opportunities in their lives;

• to understand what works in building resilience among different groups of disabled people;

• to develop a toolkit for use by Scope’s policy and services functions that outlines what Scope means by resilience, what does or doesn’t work in supporting people to become resilient, and what we can do to build resilience in disabled people throughout the life course.