A new era for The View From Down Here

Hello and welcome to this very pretty, new-look The View From Down Here! 

I'm so excited to bring you this new iteration of my anti-ableism work that I hope reflects what I'm doing now and where I want to go. 

I've been working with my brilliant, talented friend and fellow disabled woman Ali from Seated Perspectives to create a new brand and a new ethos that brings together all the different aspects of what I do, including this newsletter, the book, my journalism, my in-person and online advocacy work, and the events I'm putting on. 

Lots of that work has been on the aesthetics side of things. I now have a toolkit for creating beautiful content across Substack and Instagram that will help me bring you more of the informative and thought-provoking content you're looking for. Thanks to a beautiful new logo from another of my exceptionally talented friends, Ruby, and Ali’s patient explaining of Canva, I think we've created something that looks great and will give you a strong, recognisable voice to learn from. 

But it's not all about the aesthetic stuff. For a while now I've been struggling to articulate what exactly it is I do and why. When I first went freelance, I saw myself as a writer who had things to say about disability and ableism. Now, I see myself as an anti-ableist advocate who primarily does that work through writing. It's a subtle shift but an important one, especially as this reframing creates space for all the other work I do that isn't writing but is anti-ableist, like advising companies on accessibility or putting on events for queer disabled people. 

What we've done, then, is create a brand identity that works across all the things I do. The illustration I use for my newsletter and community-work logo is now in the same colours as the simple logo of my name that I use for more corporate work, and I'll be using the same design on social media. The illustration has also been updated to reflect who I am now and to tell you a little bit more about me when you look at it (spot the rainbow Pride pin!). Ali insisted that my personality was more “colourful” than my old branding implied (I chose to see this as a compliment), so everything is more vibrant now, too.

All of this is designed to better serve you; to allow you to easily get the most from my work wherever you happen to access it. But it's also helped me see that everything I do feeds into everything else, and that rather than being pulled in lots of directions, I am actually working towards one clear objective: creating a better society for disabled people. 

And that is where you come in!

This work is brilliant and invigorating and vital but it is also very hard. Right now I am doing a lot of it for free, which is not very sustainable (or indeed very anti-ableist!).

I'm absolutely chuffed that over 3,500 of you read this newsletter. I spend at least one day a week creating this work for you and I know from feedback that many of you really value the insights you get from reading the unvarnished truth about disability and ableism that I provide. 

But at the moment, only 2.8 percent of you pay me for all this work. I would love to be able to offer you much more that you could enjoy and learn from - including interviews with other disabled people, reviews of disability-related culture, accessible travel recommendations and more - but I can't currently afford the time it would take to do so. 

So to mark this relaunch I am asking those of you who can to please consider becoming paid subscribers to this newsletter, both to fund its expansion and to support all the other anti-ableist work I am doing. 

The subscription is £6/m - less than one fancy coffee - but there's a relaunch discount available until the end of the month that gives you 20% off for the first year. 

Any support you can give is hugely appreciated and will go a long way towards making this a sustainable job and moving us all towards a less ableist society. 

Find out more about what to expect from the newsletter here.

Please do not worry, though, if you cannot afford a subscription. I'm grateful for every reader. If you'd like to give some free support, please forward this email to a few people or share the link on social media. You never know who might see it. (And if a one-off donation suits you better, you could always order my book!)

In the meantime, thank you all so much for being here and engaging with anti-ableism. I'm so excited to bring you many more issues of this new and improved View From Down Here. 

Speak soon,
Lucy