Pauline Castres

Policy Manager

Education, Public and Third Sector
Picture of Pauline Castres

Pauline is a policy and advocacy professional with 10 years of experience working with local and national governments, EU institutions, and UN agencies. She’s also a disability and climate activist, a migrant, as well as an artist. Pauline has led major advocacy projects – for UN agencies, the British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and several health charities – including a project that won the EU NGO Health Award in 2016.

She currently works for Leonard Cheshire on the implementation of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD) in developing countries, with a focus on the intersectionality between disability and gender in education settings. Pauline has also created several ‘artivism’ pieces to explain simple disability concepts to non-disabled people in an illustrated way (e.g. her “Reframing the conversation” pieces), and bring the faces and voices of disabled people to the forefront of other human rights movements (e.g. she created 10 portraits of disabled women for International Women’s Day, to illustrate the fact that 10% of women worldwide are disabled).

Pauline has submitted several short stories to international competitions, and is currently working on her first novel. Pauline is also a migrant, and has published personal opinion pieces on the status of disabled migrants in the UK. She’s currently working on several projects with climate activists across the world to support the inclusion of disabled people in climate justice movements.

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“Decisions about disabled people’s lives are made every day by policy makers who often have zero or limited understanding of disability. If there’s one space where disabled people are needed it’s the policy and advocacy world, and I’m determined to help other disabled people enter and remain in that space.”