Inclusion after the workshop: disability access, community participation, and the limits of short-term social intervention

Abstract

Background: Disability inclusion in Durajaya Village remained vulnerable to short-term mobilisation despite a population of 5,596 residents and prior participation by 590 disabled people in a national inclusion event. Objective: This community engagement program examined whether accessible, disability-led facilitation could strengthen post-workshop participation among 40 participants, including 24 persons with disabilities. Method: A participatory planning–implementation–monitoring-evaluation design combined baseline surveys, six site audits, four workshops, two mentoring encounters, structured observations, product rubrics, focus groups, paired pre-post assessment, and eight-week action tracking. Results: Planning produced three coordination meetings, eight prioritised needs, six mapped stakeholder groups, and five core measurement instruments. Implementation recorded 134 of 160 attendance opportunities, 30 completed individual outputs, eight team proposals, and active mentoring contributions from 27 participants. Monitoring-evaluation retained 32 paired respondents, whose combined mean capacity score moved from 50.0 to 64.2, while one validation forum engaged 22 attendees and five of eight agreed actions had commenced by week eight. Novelty: This program advances a data-grounded community engagement model that distinguishes attendance, applied participation, accommodation responsiveness, community validation, and institutional follow-through across individual, relational, environmental, and organisational levels of local community practice, thereby making the temporal limits of workshop-centred inclusion empirically visible without claiming long-term or causal impact.