CEMS ACCESS Case Study
Advocacy, Community & Support for Chronic Illness in Higher Education and beyond
CEMS ACCESS is a peer support space for CEMS students and alumni living with chronic illness and long-term health conditions.
The name reflects its core values:
Advocacy - Community - Care - Empathy - Support - Sharing
I co-founded and continue to support this group as a mentor, offering guidance, conversation, and lived-experience-informed support for individuals navigating study, work and life with chronic health conditions.
How it began
CEMS ACCESS started from a very personal moment in my own health journey.
While working on content for the CEMS 35th anniversary project, I experienced a detached retina. I had been due to travel to London for the Annual Events and to conduct an interview with Leo Lotto, but was unable to attend in person due to my condition and emergency surgery and then recovery.
Instead, the interview took place online a month or two later.
During that time, I was also reflecting on something I had heard during his speech in London (I was able to listen to the livestream which made me feel like I was still able to attend). The feelings about resilience stayed with me. As a CEMS alumna myself, someone shaped by international study, adaptability, languages and high academic and professional expectations, it made me reflect deeply on my own capacity to adapt and respond to challenge.
It was a turning point in so many ways.
I realised I had both the lived experience and the skills to support others in similar situations, not in a distant or theoretical way, but in a grounded, practical, human one.
What I did next
After that period of reflection and recovery, I proposed the idea of creating a dedicated support space for students and alumni living with chronic illness and health conditions. My reasoning was that for Leo and I, such chronic conditions and life changing experiences couldn't just be our experience.
That idea became CEMS ACCESS. Thanks to the wonderful CEMS Global Office and a solid crew of CEMSies, CEMS ACCESS went live in 2025. It really showed me that people who care, show up and support others and make a real difference in people’s lives.
Since then, CEMS ACCESS has developed into an established support network where members can:
share experiences safely
access peer understanding and informal support
feel less isolated navigating study and professional life with health conditions
connect with someone who understands both the academic and lived reality of chronic illness
CEMS ACCESS has also opened the conversation in the alliance about how we include everyone who wants to become a CEMSie and accommodations at university and organisation level.
I continue to support the group as a mentor, offering lived-experience-informed guidance and presence within the community.
Why this matters
CEMS ACCESS exists because there is often a gap between academic excellence, international opportunity, organisations and the reality of living with chronic illness.
Highly capable, globally mobile students and alumni are humans but health issues means that many of those with life long conditions cannot follow academic calendars, career timelines or mobility expectations.
This work sits at the intersection of:
lived experience
community support
communication
and inclusion in educational environments
It continues to shape how I think about support, visibility, and the way organisations respond to invisible conditions.
CEMS ACCESS remains an active and evolving space and continues to inform my wider work supporting organisations to better understand and respond to chronic illness and invisible disability.
What's next?
The creation of CEMS ACCESS has brought me personal purpose and real satisfaction. When it went live, we found that people came forward for support, clearly needing that support, connection and understanding.
For me, it has been part of my own healing journey, learning to trust that having lived experiences is not separate from professional insight, but something that can meaningfully shape how we support others.
If you’re someone working in education, community or organisational spaces and thinking about how to better support people with chronic or invisible conditions, I’m always open to conversation and collaboration.
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