This Is Me Supported Employment Agency by Michelle Dobson

This Is Me Agency, based in Consett, County Durham, is a supported employment service built around the UK government’s Access to Work scheme. Founded in 2019 by Michelle Dobson, whose own background as a support worker shaped the organisation, the agency positions itself as an intermediary rather than a direct service provider — its role is to help disabled people and those with long-term health conditions navigate the practical and administrative side of getting support in place at work.

Access to Work, introduced by the Department for Work and Pensions in 1994, funds things like specialist equipment, travel costs, communication support for interviews, note-taking assistance, and — for employed and self-employed people alike — a support worker. Eligibility is broad in principle: applicants need to be 16 or over, based in England, Scotland or Wales, and either already in paid work or about to start, return to, or become self-employed. In practice, though, the scheme is notorious for slow processing, repeat form-filling and opaque decision-making, and this is the gap This Is Me Agency has built itself around. The agency handles the paperwork, makes the calls, chases the scheme on a client’s behalf, and works to match them with a support worker suited to their role and their working style, rather than leaving someone recently diagnosed or newly out of work to manage a government process alone.

The agency’s core offer sits across three strands. The first is Access to Work casework itself — form completion, liaison with the scheme, and ongoing coordination once support is approved. The second is its support worker pool, made up of a mix of directly employed staff and self-employed contractors, which gives it some flexibility in matching people to particular workplace needs rather than offering a single fixed model of support. The third is a networking strand, bringing clients and support workers together through events — a smaller but distinctive part of the offer, suggesting the agency sees its role as building a community around the work as well as processing applications.

Michelle Dobson’s stated position is that people should be able to work regardless of disability, given the right training and support, and the agency frames itself around four working values — passion, enthusiasm, understanding, and drive — that describe an outlook rather than a clinical methodology. There is no suggestion anywhere in the agency’s own material of a therapeutic or diagnostic model; this is a practical, logistics-and-advocacy service sitting alongside the state system, not a clinical or coaching intervention. For neurodivergent employees specifically, that focus on paperwork and coordination is likely to be the main draw: many of the barriers to using Access to Work in the first place are administrative rather than medical, and having someone chase the scheme and vet support workers can be the difference between support existing on paper and support actually reaching someone’s desk.

For employers, the relevance is less about direct organisational consultancy and more about a referral point: a business with a disabled or neurodivergent employee who is entitled to Access to Work funding but struggling with the process has a specialist agency to point them towards, rather than leaving the employee to negotiate a government scheme alongside their job. This Is Me Agency does not itself run training, audits or policy work for organisations — its listing here sits in the workplace category because its function is squarely about keeping disabled and neurodivergent people in employment, but the mechanism is casework and support-worker brokerage rather than employer-facing consulting.