The World Leisure Field School 2025

This article was written for Uncover magazine and published for the World Leisure Congress that took place at the end of August.

Authors: Marco van Leeuwen is a lecturer and researcher in Ethics and Research Integrity at Breda
University of Applied Sciences. Mireia Iglesias is Communication & Events Officer at the World Leisure Organization. Peter Horsten is a lecturer and researcher at Academy for Leisure & Events, Breda University of Applied Sciences.

The schedule will feature a diverse mix of company visits and project design sessions. Field School students, from different cultures, contexts, and academic backgrounds will work together with experiential experts (people with disabilities, who are experts in understanding and navigating their specific conditions) to assess the accessibility of several leisure organisations and attractions in Breda, and co-create ideas for improvement. The outcomes of this collaboration will be showcased during the World Leisure Congress.

For ambitious young academics, the benefits from participating in this Field School includes contributing to a socially relevant project. Young leisure specialists hoping to expand their professional network will be immersed in a vibrant community of enthusiastic peers and leisure professionals and scholars, enabling them to make friends and establish professional contacts that might last a lifetime.

This project aligns with ambitions that have already been gaining traction in Breda. The local organisation Breda voor Iedereen, for instance, published their ‘Manifest Breda van en voor Iedereen’ ( ‘Breda belongs to and works for everyone’ Manifesto) in 2022, in which they outlined their ambitions for an optimally accessible Breda. The underlying ambition was - and still is - to make Breda win the Access City Awards election in 2030. The World Leisure Field School 2025 will do its part in making this ambition more achievable.

Talent and inclusion in the business events sector
The Field School is itself part of a larger project aimed at making business events more accessible for people with disabilities, funded by the BE>FUTURE Accelerator Grant Programme, co-funded by the European Union.

The business events sector is a key link in the ecosystem of exchanging capital - economic, social, and cultural. We aim to help it prepare for the future by co-developing a fair, evidence-based approach to accessibility and inclusion. 

Collaboration between future professionals and experts with disabilities will integrate universal design into business events, enhancing accessibility for all. For people with disabilities, participation as either event visitors or event creators (at the organisational and/or operational level(s)) is often still a problem today. This project aims to remedy that problem by co-designing accessibility and inclusion solutions with future events and leisure professionals, including students, experts with disabilities, industry professionals, and scholars. Our aims are:=

1. Full inclusion: Business events must move beyond passive accessibility to actively integrate people with disabilities, ensuring inclusion in leisure, work, and career growth.
2. Equal participation: Inclusion goes beyond attendance, people with disabilities must shape event planning, operations, and leadership, ensuring a fairer, more dynamic industry.
3. Restoring the human dimension: As business events embrace digitisation, prioritising accessibility that ensures genuine human interaction, empathy, and meaningful engagement.

The project
The project itself is a co-creative design process. Step 1 is centred around the World Leisure Field School 2025, connected to the World Leisure Congress 2025, in Breda, the Netherlands, in the second half of August 2025. The Field School includes online pre-sessions to collect insights into event accessibility from around the world; on-site visitor journey assessments with international Field School students and experiential experts of two leisure facilities in Breda, plus the World Leisure Congress 2025 business event; and inviting input from the hundreds of international leisure and events experts attending the congress, through participatory action research and design research interventions.

Building on Step 1, in Step 2 BUas students will develop a strategic plan to enhance business event accessibility for people with disabilities, both as attendees and contributors. They will collaborate with other universities from the World Leisure Centers of Excellence network to integrate intercultural insights. Step 3 will consist of a trial event at BUas to test prototype solutions and refine plans based on the recommendations from Steps 1 and 2. An international jury, including experiential experts, business event professionals, and researchers, will assess these plans.

Innovative scope
In this project, we strive for a substantial, significant improvement of business event concepts by integrating accessibility without disrupting established practices or sidelining industry veterans. By leveraging best practices and co-designing solutions, we merge experience with fresh perspectives, fostering innovation while ensuring inclusive participation, particularly for people with disabilities. 

This project will drive significant progress by embedding universal accessibility assessments into business events, tourism, professional gatherings, and urban leisure spaces, enhancing existing services and infrastructure to create a fairer and more forward-thinking industry.

Value first, revenue will follow
There are considerable market opportunities for business events if they include people with disabilities in a more systematic manner: the Global Economics of Disability Report 2024 values the ‘global disability market’ at over US$18 trillion. There is also growing scholarly interest in the events sector for including participants with disabilities. In addition, there is cross-sectoral potential if we consider similar access-and-inclusion initiatives in tourism and aviation - essential partners for the business events sector.

However, at its core, this project is not about profit but about creating value - ideas, recommendations, and concepts that enhance business events for visitors and improve labour market opportunities for people with disabilities. By fostering accessibility and inclusion, we help retain industry expertise while enriching the event experience for all stakeholders. We will provide concrete specifications and prototype event designs, refined through user experience insights from MICE organisers, future professionals, and people with disabilities. The tools developed in this process will form a scalable, shareable framework for addressing future accessibility and inclusion challenges in the industry.

The project’s budget reflects its priorities, with the majority of funding dedicated to those at the heart of this project's impact: people with disabilities. They will be paid for their experiential expertise. As we have already done in previous projects, we will collaborate with LFB, an advocacy organisation for (and run by) people with mild cognitive disabilities. This organisation supports a programme in which its members are trained as experiential experts (also called ‘self-advocates’) - people with first-person expertise in the challenges of specific disabilities, intimate knowledge of which accessibility solutions might be feasible (and which might not be), and the training to operationalise this expertise to assess and advise on accessibility challenges of businesses. This unique expertise deserves real recognition - experiential experts should be compensated at a fair market rate for their specialist knowledge. 

Meaningful change as a value accelerator
We intend to help the business sector to prepare for the future by co-creating an evidence-based, tested and testable, ethically grounded and fair operationalisation of the oft-used concepts of accessibility and inclusion. We will experiment with co-designed solutions to find the best approaches to the main accessibility challenges of the business events sector. By investing in people, ideas and technology, we drive meaningful, lasting change. We will develop a fair, ethical, and respectful approach to integrating people with disabilities in the business events sector. In this way, the project serves as a value accelerator: the value we aim to co-create does not benefit merely the stakeholders directly involved in the project, but also constitutes a pay-it-forward scheme in which we develop innovations, solutions, and concepts that we will make available for free to everyone. Improving the accessibility of the business events sector for people with disabilities, in order to include them more effectively, fairly and ethically both as business event visitors and organisers, can truly be seen as a value accelerator.