ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide a survival toolkit for building good working relationships between disabled people and providers of the environment we live and work in. Sheffield has a number of well-established disabled user/provider collaboration groups. “Sleeping with the enemy” is a pejorative expression first used to describe the survival-driven collusion of disempowered victims with their oppressors during wartime, and has often been used synonymously with the word “collaboration”. From the 1970s until 1986, the Council for Voluntary Services hosted the “Sheffield Co-ordinating Committee for the Disabled”. Although direct interaction between disabled people and council officers had borne some fruit, disabled people decided to set up an organisation that they could control and manage themselves. The City Council’s desire to use the expertise of disabled people was tempered by the fear that their participation in decision-making committees would remove power from locally elected representatives.
