19/06/2026
Please join us in giving a warm welcome to Damian Joseph Bridgeman, our Chair of The Wheelchair Collective, the UK's first national advisory network of wheelchair users.
"My name is Damian and I chair The Wheelchair Collective on one principle: wheelchair users should set the agenda for wheelchair services, not be invited in once the decisions are made.
"As a disabled Welshman who has spent decades inside the systems I am now reforming, I know what slow services cost. Waiting years for a chair that fits. Fighting for equipment that works. Watching independence rise or fall on a single clinical decision made by someone who has never sat in the seat. That experience shapes how I chair The Wheelchair Collective.
"Under my chairmanship, The Wheelchair Collective is a national table where wheelchair users hold the pen. The mission is straightforward: better chairs with dignity built in. Services designed with disabled people, not for them. A system that listens before it spends.
"Outside of The Wheelchair Collective I am co-chief executive of Bridgeman Community Foundation, a pan-Wales cooperative I lead with my husband Paul. I also serve on the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee at the Department for Transport and on the Independent Disability Advisory Panel at the Department for Work and Pensions.
"I also advise Welsh Government on disability equality and housing policy, and I am a five-year named research partner with Cardiff University."
Wheelchair users can contact Damian at - [email protected]
