SDN General Meeting, 9th December 2010

Network meeting hits the spot on all fronts

By Val Lewis

What a great meeting this morning of Shropshire Disability Network. Despite the awful weather we had a good turnout of people at Mereside Centre and there was a lot to hear about today too!

I’ve set out the headlines below but they are just my take on things and anyone can pick me up if I have missed something or mistinterpreted – thats what the comment box is for please use it!

So, pick and choose, but make sure you read about Enabled by Design – Dominic Campbell our guest speaker gave us a great insight into the way stuff should be designed and it provoked a huge amount of discussion in the room and Dom took a few ideas back with him to think about too!

SDN Business

Chair Geoff Forgie told everyone about:

•  the change in date for the Disability Awareness Day – Please put 16th October 2010 in your diaries and remove the June date.
• the ‘Walk and Roll’ Day – 10th April 2010, a chance to take some exercise and raise some funds for SDN in the Quarry, Shrewsbury
• Collection days – volunteers gladly welcomed in the Darwin Centre in March and September next year
• Employment Group – Ann Johnson told us about the work that this group is going to around supporting people with disability in the workplace with better information and supporting employers to help people with disabilities in the workplace. The working group meet again on Tuesday 5th January, 10.00 am at Mereside – they have already put together lots of ideas, and welcome more people with more ideas if you can attend.  See the website for details.

My Life My Choice

Ruby Hartshorn and Ann Johnson did a brilliant and informative double act on the progress of the Pioneers who have been testing out the processes for Personalised Budgets in Shropshire.  

Messages included: 

• It doesn’t have to change the way you receive your care if you are happy with what you have, but it does give you the chance to make changes if you feel you would benefit from a different way of spending your budget.    
• The process makes your social worker more aware of what matters and is important to you and changes your relationship for the better
• There is a clearly laid out pathway for you called “The 7 steps to being in control of my support” and this helps you to  understand what is involved
• Everyone who has a care package will move over to new system gradually, but there are a variety of ways of doing this and you can pick and mix the best options for you
• Ann has been recruited as a Champion of My Life My Choice and can be contacted to help people understand what is involved. To contact her, email mylifemychoice@shropshire.gov.uk  then  just put on it for attention of Ann Johnson it will get to her. 

General Comments

There was quite a chat around this in the audience and Sue commented on her concerns about the consultation on the future of the Disability Living Allowance and how important it was for everyone to respond to this to say what they want.  Here is a link to the document - follow it now and share your views, but it would be great if people started posting comments on our website too - we could do with a good old debate about this one.

Disability Hate Crime

I told the meeting about the Disability Hate Crime Event I chaired yesterday in Walsall, and we talked abit about finding out the stats for hate crime in Shropshire.

Alan Turner has kindly rung tonight with the number of the police officer who holds these stats, so I will add them in for you to see as soon as I have them.  The message was Disability Hate Crime is not acceptable in any form, from persistent teasing, bullying, abusive language or behaviour towards anyone with a disability or their family or friends. The Crown Prosecution Service and the Police want to work together on this to punish offenders, but also to put in place education programmes to prevent it happening in the first place.

Enabled by Design

Dominic Campbell from Enabled by Design was the guest speaker and he had travelled up from London to talk to us in what turned out to be a brilliant 40 minutes of information which stimulated loads of questions, alot of laughter and a wealth of ideas for Dom to take back and share with others.

Dom and his very good friend Denise Stephens set up Enabled by Design when Denise was diagnosed with MS at 25 years of age and was frustrated by the expectation of health professionals and the world at large, that she should be happy to have assistive aids that were designed in the dark ages, and in any other setting would probably be valuable antiques, but because they support people with disability, it seems that they are fine to be noisy, grey, clunky, plastic and about as unattractive as they could be!

Denise and Dom, through the website, and with the help of 100s of other people with disabilities, are sourcing funkier looking but functional products that help all sort of people to live their lives without feeling that they have to look different or have homes which look like hospital wards!  

It was a great presentation and clearly struck a chord with most people in the room.   People talked about their frustration with badly designed equipment, gave ideas to Dom to take back to Denise to explore further, and some will almost certainly go to the Enabled web site to participate in discussions, ask others for sources of useful items and generally join in the debate.

Why should people with a disability have to have stuff that is designed to look different when half the stuff they need is also used every day by many people without a disability, but if designed better could be be used by everyone without discriminating? Go and have a look at the website, and SDN will explore whether we could have a Shropshire ideas page on SDN and link with Dom and Denise’s site to give a local view.

Downloads

2010 9th Dec Minutes

ME talk 9 Dec