A DISABILITY rights campaigner from Oxford’s Greater Leys estate has died aged 40.

Rowen Jade was the chairman of Equality 2025, a body which advises the Government on disability issues, from 2008 onwards.

Born Sharon Mace to Bob and Janet Mace in Oxford, she grew up in Chinnor, near Thame.

She had a very severe form of spinal muscular atrophy and doctors predicted she would only live a few years.

But the former Lord Williams’s School pupil went on to achieve a double first in English and law at Oxford Brookes University before beginning her career in disability rights, running empowerment projects for disabled children at the Alliance for Inclusive Education in London.

In the early 1990s, she became involved in the campaign for independent living and the use of direct payments to enable disabled people to employ personal assistants, instead of being dependent upon local authority services.

In 1996 she took the name Rowen Jade.

Three years later, the Alliance for Inclusive Education published the report she co-authored with Christine Wilson, Whose Voice Is It Anyway?

It focused on the experience of young people in special and mainstream schools and helped influence the Government white paper Every Disabled Child Matters.

After moving to Bristol in 2000, she joined the West of England Centre for Inclusive Living (WECIL), where she pioneered extending the provision of independent living services to disabled teenagers.

A proud lesbian, after returning to Oxford she and her partner Jaz Ishtar had a child Olivia, now 10.

With Michelle Waites she wrote Bigger Than the Sky (1999), about the challenges of disabled parenting.

She was also one of the first disabled people to speak out against a change in the law on assisted suicide and was a founder member of Not Dead Yet UK in 2006.

Ms Jade, who lived in Coltsfoot Square, died from a chest infection while on holiday last month.

Her funeral was held in south Gloucestershire last month.