Tuesday, December 9th, 2008
The Holiday at Home Reunion, which we’ve mentioned in previous blog entries, was held on 2 December. 73 past guests from the past eight years of the project enjoyed a home cooked Christmas lunch, festive entertainment, games, a sing-song, an elaborate tea, Father Christmas and photos. Another great day run by volunteers – looking forward to 2009!
Category Northampton
Thursday, November 27th, 2008
We were really pleased to hear that the lord mayor of Manchester, Mavis Smitheman would be coming along to see us in action at our club, the YMCA, but we were a bit worried that our new t-shirts wouldnt arrive in time for the visit!
A group of twelve young wrestlers aged between six and seventeen performed wrestling techniques and gymnastic skills they have been learning under the guidance of coaches Bill Cooper, Tommy Roche and Dave Penkethman.
The lord Mayor was then presented with an engraved trophy by two of the clubs youngest wrestlers, who then, with the rest of the youngsters heard about the Mayor’s own pastimes….. parachute jumping and weight lifting!
Category Manchester
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
Sara and Eric were invited to receive the Pitch your Project prize money at the Service Users’ and Carers’ day at Staffordshire Hospital this month. The title of the day was Getting the Basics Right and several workshops were held on service user involvement. We were pleased to be able to run a workshop about communication and the difficulties that some people with Asperger’s syndrome have when using or understanding language.
The afternoon saw many people receiving awards from the NHS. We were proudly presented with the Pitch your Project prize money by from Richard Beeken, Chief Operating Officer, from South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust. We will now send our photo and a press release to the paper and try again!
Now that we actually have the prize money, we can start to do more to encourage volunteering with Autonomy. We can help members of Autonomy mentor and support each other outside of our social events and also will help encourage new members to join our group. Autonomy has been funded primarily by donations so with new funding we can also send Christmas cards to all our members this year.
Activities this month have increased and included a cinema trip, ten pin bowling, a ghost walk around Shrewsbury and two daytime socials. The last social of 2008 will be our Christmas dinner next month but many new activities will be planned for the New Year.
Category Pitch Winners Blog, Shrewsbury
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
As mentioned in a previous post, we have now held our ‘outreach meeting’, which was designed to promote the work of the Holiday at Home scheme to other organisations with the desire for those organisations to start their own Holiday at Home events.
The meeting went well, there was a great atmosphere and everything we presented was well received. Those who expressed interest in attending and hearing about Holiday at Home but were unable to attend have received a folder (as distributed at the meeting) to help them start up. We have also offered to meet new organising committees if they need further assistance, advice or help.
It was very encouraging that several of those who came to our meeting were from opposite areas of the town, from areas that are too far away for us to cover with our own Holiday at Home project. One even in a village. This means that more lonely, elderly folk from other districts in the town will be able to benefit from the Holiday at Home scheme.
Thank you TimeBank!
Category Northampton, Pitch Winners Blog
Sunday, November 9th, 2008
Joanna Francis at local Trust's Celebration Event for Service Users and Carers
Just a quick update to say that as a result of winning Pitch Your Project and in recognition of the work done by the group, we were honoured to be included in the South Staffordshire and Shropshire Healthcare NHS FoundationTrust’s celebration event for Service Users and Carers on Friday 7th November. We were delighted when Steve Grange – Director, Business Development for the Trust warmly said that we were welcome to contact him if we wanted any support in the future.
What a boost!
The Lighthouse Group
Category Pitch Winners Blog, Staffordshire
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
On Thursday 23rd October we were presented with our award by Mike Brereton, Chairman of The University Hospital of North Staffordshire at one of their special drop-in public consultation days on its plans to become a Foundation Trust. The event took place at The Gatehouse Theatre in Stafford. The media were invited for a photo opportunity and interview opportunities with the Hospital representatives who sponsored the Staffordshire Dragon’s Den event and The Lighthouse Group and an article was published in the Stafford Express and Star. 
The smiles on our faces show how honoured and delighted we were to receive our prize.
Now we have the funding, we are raring to move ahead with our plans to develop and provide a better service. One of our main priorities is to attract the volunteers we desperately need and hope that the leaflet we have designed, (which happily we can now afford to have printed), will be fruitful.
In the meantime we are working on our present agenda. As well as other topics, one of the purposes of our next meeting is to form a proper committee which will allow participants to share responsibilities, improve the performance of the group and provide a forum for examining issues in greater depth.
The theme of our last meeting held on Thursday 23rd October was ‘The educational implications of ADHD and what support is available to parents.’ We were very fortunate to have as our guest speaker a Senior Practitioner Educational Psychologist from the Stafford and South Staffs District Office. It proved to be a very informative and interactive session.
On 15th November, we have arranged some fun for the children at the local tenpin bowling centre. This is an activity that the children have greatly enjoyed in the past. It will give them the opportunity to meet up again and promises to be a good outing.
A further meeting has been arranged for Tuesday 2nd December. Again we are fortunate to have a guest speaker, a specialist registrar who will be talking about ‘The medical aspects of ADHD and how doctors can help’. This will be a lunch-time session at our usual meeting place. Parents will have the opportunity to ask questions and the doctor who is speaking has pledged to research any issues she is unable to answer.
NETWORKING
We are currently working hard with the Wolverhampton ADHD Support Group to strengthen links between our parents in Staffordshire and theirs in the West Midlands and good progress is being made. We were recently invited to one of their meetings and despite the distance, two of our parents travelled there to attend. They found it very helpful and came back full of enthusiasm. The Wolverhampton Group will be joining us in Stafford on 28th January. The theme of this session will be comparing experiences. It will be a getting to know you type of session, discussing topics such as diagnosis pathway, support available, local activities etc. Hopefully from this we can get ideas of what works best in each area to lobby for improvements in all local patches. We have also been in contact with a new group that has recently formed in Lichfield and have sent out an invitation to them hoping some of their parents will be able to attend also.
We will keep you updated, so – watch this space!
Category Pitch Winners Blog, Staffordshire
Saturday, November 1st, 2008
Autonomy has been invited to receive our Pitch your Project cheque next week at an event in Staffordshire. Eric and I will be going and are very much looking forward to the occasion. We will be pleased to receive the cheque as then we can do more to help people with Asperger’s syndrome in Shropshire. We have also been asked to write an article on winning the competiton for a local NHS newsletter, so this may give us some more publicity.
Our Autonomy socials are continuing to flourish and we had three new members at our last social event. Our numbers at the socials are increasing and all seem to enjoy themselves when they come. We have also been encouraging our members to mentor and help eachother outside of our Autonomy socials. This has been very successful so far and it is great to see how members are supporting themselves through helping others.
On the publicity front, Sara met with the Shropshire MPs in mid October and it was a very interesting session as the MPs had little knowledge of the numbers of people with Asperger’s syndrome in Shropshire and the vacuum in services that Autonomy tries to fill. We hope this meeting will raise awareness of Asperger’s syndrome as well.
Our socials have normally been in Shrewsbury as more people have traditionally attended these events but as we are growing as a group, we have now organised our first Telford social event at a town centre pub. This will be held next week. We hope our new activity will enable Telford members to socialise without having to travel to Shrewsbury, although any member is very welcome to attend any Autonomy social event! We are also having a group watch the newly released James Bond film next week, have organised a Ghost Walk in late November, and booked our Christmas Dinner in December so we are managing to develop more interesting events for our members. When the prize cheque is banked then we will be able to do even more!
Category Pitch Winners Blog, Shrewsbury
Wednesday, October 29th, 2008
My name is Shamela Vice chair of (BBWA). I made the presentation on the 05/09/08 with a very valued volunteer member – Mrs Noorjahan Begum.
Winning the two grand was a great joy for BBWA, especially as it was Ramadhan at the time when we did our pitch to the panel of dragons. Believe me the count to the final day was hectic, however was a huge relief when our pitch was over, so was part of my mental stress.
However the phone call to say we had won the prize money, I can’t put to words how excited and pleased I was ‘’ finally we had money’’ to start planning and developing more services to deliver to our service users.
We were invited to the AGM of Bedfordshire and Luton mental health and social care partnership trust (BLPT) and were honoured to receive the award.
However since then we have been extremely busy making plans to further develop the aims of the group.
On the 18th of October we organised an Eid party. It was held at a local venue for women to come and celebrate the end of Ramadhan, with their friends and families. We arranged activities such as bouncy castle, colouring competitions, facials, massage and a raffle for all to participate and enjoy. Not forgetting we had a huge variety of Asian food ordered for the day, as well as prepared by our volunteers and members. Our volunteers and members took huge responsibility and ownership in the running of the event. The day was a huge success with a turn out of over 200 people. We had a journalist from Bangla TV (digital channel 786) come to do some recording to show the event to the wider community on their International community news.
One of the main areas we wanted to focus on with this money was in providing training to our volunteers especially First Aid, Health and Safety etc. We have already had meetings with Bedford College and have received quotes from them. We are looking into providing the training in dual language (English/Bengali) and are considering costing and value for money. I will let you know more of this once we know more.
In the meantime BBWA are working alongside members of the Bangladeshi community, voluntary and statutory bodies to launch the formation of Bedford Bangladeshi Community Council on the 30th of November 2008. We will be helping to organise the event. Our volunteers will be playing a huge part in distributing leaflets, preparing refreshments, helping to set up, transport and direct people to the venue.
We will be holding a stall and intend to provide a huge amount of information on BBWA what its all about, what progress the organisation has made to date and what its aims are for the future. We will also be producing a newsletter and a leaflet to recruit more volunteers to the group to further expand and strengthen the key aims of the project.
I look forward to giving you feedback on this event very soon, and progress on the training for our volunteers.
Shamela Khatun
Category Bedford and Luton, Pitch Winners Blog
Sunday, October 19th, 2008
We’ve got it – our prize!
Sheila Baker of Friends of Northampton General Hospital made the presentation at Mount Pleasant Baptist Church with three members of the team and two past guests. £2000 and a chcolate cake: wow!
A local newspaper took photographs of the event, and we’ll let you know if a story gets printed. Attached is a picture from the event.
Category Northampton, Pitch Winners Blog
Tuesday, October 14th, 2008
October 10th
We decided to raise the profile of Autonomy again this month during National Autism Week (Oct 6-10th). We put our Autonomy information boards together with an exhibition of our art on display at the Shire Hall. It was a good exhibition and many other groups had their display boards up too. By the end of the week all our information brochures had gone so we know that more people know about our group.
We also had a display in Shrewsbury Square today for the Council run World Mental Health day. Again many of our leaflets were handed out and we met many interesting people. It was a large event but it was disappointing yet again not to be mentioned in the media.
Category Pitch Winners Blog, Shrewsbury
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