A very happy new year.

Over quite a lot of turkey and a couple of glasses of red wine(!) during the festive break, I thought about 2019, and what this year might hold for Purple.

As readers of my blogs will know part of what makes Purple different is our support to disabled people, our support to organisations, and our commitment to bring these two audiences together to find the solutions of tomorrow. And these solutions are rooted in the perspectives, lived experiences and realities of today and the vision of what it can and should be.

And so, in no particular order, our resolutions:

• We provide support to over 4,500 disabled people to have real choice and control over their lives through our direct payment support services. In 2018 our services were not good enough and 2019 is about getting it right and growing the service. We have increased our staffing, increased our telephone lines, and invested in training. We are committed to providing excellent customer service and there will be a step change in our performance this year. This commitment will also include proactively seeking feedback from our customers to ensure our words become actions.
• We want to build on our commitment to get more disabled people into employment by continuing to run our successful employment support programme. By the end of January we will have launched our innovative job board which will attract disabled candidates to organisations actively looking for talented employees of the future. My next blog will focus on this initiative in more detail.
• We want to treble the number Purple members and partners. These are organisations working with us to improve their services to disabled customers and existing and future disabled employees.
• We will continue to roll out and expand the range of products and services offered to business including training, and physical, online and people audits.
• We will build on the success of Purple Tuesday (purpletuesday.org.uk) to promote the importance of the Purple pound to more organisations across all sectors. Purple Tuesday will become synonymous with the highest standard of customer service 365 days a year for disabled people and their families.
• We will dip our toes internationally to reflect the fact disability is a global issue.
• And we will strive to make Purple an employer of choice for all our staff, modelling disability confidence and being the leader in our field.

If you are a current direct payment support service customer of Purple, may I take this opportunity to apologise for our shortcomings this year and say I look forward to providing you a much-enhanced service and working with you during the year ahead to directly improve our services.

If you are an organisation reading this, I very much hope you will be a part of making Purple successful and by doing so accelerating your own disability journey.

2019 looks to be a big year in Purple’s history. I am very much looking forward to the ride.

Mike