According to our members the best way to build real momentum in your disability strategy is to start with the lived experiences of your own people - and in order to do that you need to get them sharing their story.

That is why we kick off 2019 with a focus on how you can better support your own people to share their story of disability and mental ill health for personal and business impact and we have a bunch of goodies this month to set you up for the year ahead.

We will:

• Offer new insights about the business and personal value of telling the story of disability
• Offer insights about how individuals can do this well for business and personal impact
• Help you to get excited about the things you can do to support cultural change through quality story telling by your network / resource group
• Offer you the opportunity to engage with PurpleSpace Ambassadors and fellow members

What can you look forward to this month?

David Caldwell, Founding Ambassador will kick off the month for us with a welcome in the Member Zone - and pose the big question, "How do we encourage our employees to share their story of disability?"

We're excited to be launching a brand new series of Podcasts and the first in the series is called "The Untold Story of Disability" where Simon Minty a regular podcaster on BBC Ouch, interviews our CEO Kate Nash OBE about the importance of sharing your story of disability. During the interview Kate will share some examples of what the impact has been for individuals as well as organisations.

We also launch "Creating Impact by Telling Stories", a new resource about the value of encouraging employees to share their story as well as the "Purple Confidence Pilot Toolkit" and the new "Purple Passport - Destination Success" a review of its use and the key principles to get right, kindly supported by our sponsors Microlink.

New for this year is a series of reviews of external resources which might help you in your work. This month our consultant Sally Ward takes a look at "Do - Story. How to tell your story so the world listens" by Bobette Buster - a must read if you want to learn more about how to help your members share their story.

Our Spotlight On member interview by Jim Pollard this month is with Anna Button, Employee Relations Officer at West Yorkshire Police and chair of the force's Disabled Association (WYPDA). Read Anna's interview with Jim here.

To round the month up, we invite you to drop into our first Member Zone Chat (MZChat) between 16:00 - 17:00 on Monday 28th January - get yourself a cup of tea and join in the conversation led by PurpleSpace Ambassador, David Caldwell, to share learning and offer your top tips to other members.

The five questions for discussion are:

1. What do you see as the value of Storytelling as a network / resource group tool?
2. How do we better help our employees to feel comfortable sharing their story?
3. What storytelling campaigns have you seen that you'd like to emulate?
4. What's the biggest challenge for delivering a storytelling campaign in your workplace?
5. Which of the resources have you found most valuable this month and why?

Finally, if you need a bit of one-to-one support on the topic of storytelling, book yourself a Power Hour session on Monday 21st January with senior consultant Sarah Simcoe.

Diary alert

If you have any budding story-tellers among your colleagues who need a bit of support to perfect their story why not signpost them to our next Purple Stories workshop being hosted by Gowling WLG in Birmingham on 13 March 2019.