Advocacy In Greenwich

News

I’m a Person too Project

GCAP and Working with Words have been working on a project with 2 other projects in Rotherham and Wiltshire.
It is called the ‘I’m a Person too Project.’
We worked together on a training pack and we have all been training staff in different services. The Greenwich Team was Chris Judge, Kathy Smith and Anita Rickard.

Kathy, Chris and Anita trained staff in the Citizens Advice Bureau Police and Housing services to work better with people with learning disabilities. We helped them to think about how they can communicate better with people with learning disabilities.
We trained 116 people in 8 different sessions.

Most people really enjoyed the training. They said that it was important that people with learning disabilities were co-trainers. They also said that they learnt a lot about communication from hearing real life stories and from having a go at making information easy to understand.

We met with the trainers from the other 2 projects to look at what worked well in our training and what didn’t work so well. We put all our ideas together and changed the training pack.

Chris has now left the project and we are looking for at least two more people to become co-trainers in Greenwich.

Each project will do 2 more training sessions with the new training pack and we will meet again in November to see if the training pack works.

When the training pack is finished it will be sold to organisations like GCAP and WWW so that they can train staff in different services to communicate, and work better with people with learning disabilities.

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Valuing People Workshops

GCAP were asked by Greenwich Council to find out what people with learning disabilities think are the most important things in their lives.
And to find out how services must change to make things better for people with learning disabilities
We were asked to support people to answer some questions that the government thought were important.
The main questions were about:
Having choice and control
Having better health
Choosing what to do in the day and the evening
Choosing where you live and who you live with.
30 people came to both workshops and worked very hard.
We wrote a report which we sent to the Valuing People Support team and to Greenwich Council.
These are some of the things that people said could help to make things better.
We want to be able to write letters, talk to MP’s, have meetings, invite MP’s to meetings.

• We need more self advocacy groups.
• You need to listen to us to check on how services are doing.
  You need to come to us and ask us what we think.
• We need to be able to talk about things in groups at the Partnership Board.
• We need more information about the Partnership Board.
  
• We need more information about other groups that we can be involved in.
• We need more workshops.