Read our latest News
Dear Friends and Supporters,
Hello and welcome to our latest newsletter. Spring is in the air and we are pleased to announce some new growth at Lewisham Speaking Up!
First, we welcome Ellie Spirrett to the team as our new Self-Advocacy Coordinator. Ellie will be taking over lots of our self-advocacy groups and brings some great experience to the role. I hope you all will get to meet Ellie in the coming months.
We will also be starting an exciting new project with Entelechy Arts, which aims to raise the voice of people with profound and multiple learning disability (PMLD) in the borough. We plan to bring together Entelechy’s Ambient Jam and our People’s Parliament to see what we can achieve together. We hope to break some new ground with this work, so watch this space!
We are pleased to say that Jan, our 1-2-1 Community Advocate, will also be working an extra day every week from April 2024, enabling us to help more people resolve their issues.
We have almost completed our work looking at how the health and social care sector can employ more neuro-diverse people.
South East London NHS awarded us a grant to produce a report looking at the barriers to employment and to identify some possible solutions. We set up a steering group of 5 experts by experience to work on the project.
We ran several workshops asking people with learning disabilities and autistic people what they thought were the issues. The report should be widely available by the time you read this.
We are looking forward to restarting our monthly Big Group meeting in April. This will be an opportunity for people with learning disabilities to decide what they would like to talk about and meet other people at the same time. But more on this in our next Newsletter!
As the weather turns warmer and hopefully sunnier, we will be doing our first ever sponsored walk in April. If you’d like to sponsor Marsh, please follow this link. Here’s hoping for some fine weather!
Marsh Stitchman, Director
Self-Advocacy
People’s Parliament
In February, our People’s Parliament rep Aisha gave the key note opening speech at the Learning Disability England London conference.
She spoke with passion about how we try to influence decision makers and her speech went down very well.
Our most recent People’s Parliament was about Housing and we were pleased to welcome guests from the Council’s Housing team, from South London and Maudsley NHS Trust and from Learning Disability England amongst others.
We were also joined by people with learning disabilities from Oxfordshire and Brighton.
Contact
Phone: 020 8692 1862
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