Talking to support organisations about self-advocacy

Blog from Gary Bourlet and the LDE Team

This year, Learning Disability England are giving workshops on self-advocacy to people who work for organisations that give support or care to people with learning disabilities.

We are getting the people who come along to think about what self-advocacy is and what they can do for self-advocacy in their job.

We think people who are in this work should support and encourage self-advocacy groups and self-advocacy but should not take over.
Self-Advocacy groups should really be run by people with learning disabilities, autism and other disabilities and members should speak for themselves on issues.

We also think people can make small changes to support self-advocacy like learning more about it and talking about it on social media.
Some other things we talk to them about are; what self- advocacy is, the history of self-advocacy and the different types of self-advocacy groups.

We know that a lot of people who work for support organisations don’t know a lot about self-advocacy but want to learn more.

We gave our first training workshop on the 9th January and it went really well. We held it for some people who work for Choice Support and coming in to it they were all excited to learn about self-advocacy.

Some interesting discussions were had. From the feed-back we know the people who went learnt a lot and most of them said they were going to make changes based on what they had learnt. This was great to hear!

We are excited and hopeful about giving more workshops in future. We also want to thank Choice Support and everyone who came for taking the time to learn about self-advocacy and for agreeing to make up our first workshop.

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