This summer, we put on Autonomy Fusion, our exhibition of the artistic work of young people and adults with Asperger’s syndrome. The exhibition was held at the Hive Gallery, in Shrewsbury, and later at the Shropshire Autism Conference. To cover the costs of the exhibition we applied for a Shropshire Arts Grant, and were successful. The artists have had their expenses paid, and also have been paid as artists. This has really helped to inspire and motivate them. We were also successful at getting a Mid Counties Cooperative Community Grant towards some display boards, which we can use for our publicity or in other exhibitions.

We got some publicity too when we received a phone call from the Rotary Club who had received a letter from us over a year ago. They appeared at one of our socials to present a cheque, and we featured in the local paper. The cheque paid for our summer outing on the Sabrina river boat on the River Severn last Sunday afternoon.

Autonomy is growing from strength to strength. A grant from the European Social Fund is helping to pay towards our Inspire! mentoring project for new members. It is also paying for Motivate! a series of self esteem boosting courses to be run for our members run by a qualified life coach. This is a new venture for our group and will definitely inspire our members to live more positive lives.

Autonomy is growing and gaining more funding too. We got a small grant from the Mid Counties Co-op last month as we applied for it! We will be putting on “Fusion” – a display of art, poetry and photographs from our members, backed by music specially composed by Eric for the event – just right for support from the Co-op. Fusion is at the Hive Arts Centre in Shrewsbury from May 29th – June 26th and is an opportunity to promote the skills and abilities of local people with Asperger’s syndrome. See Asperger’s syndrome is not all negative! Fusion is yet another way to gain us more publicity and funding! A press release is on its way to the local paper – again!

How do you get more publicity for your group? Have a birthday party and use your pitch your project funding to celebrate it!

Autonomy had its fifth birthday party last month and over 70 people came, including our mayor, some councillors and a lot of people connected with Asperger’s syndrome. We had over 30 members come too. It was a great evening. We a lovely buffet, had a display of art work and photos, some music and entertainment from our members and also a drumming workshop to finish.

As a result we have had a few enquiries for membership and got to talk on Radio Shropshire. We also have been interviewed for an article in the Shrewsbury Chronicle, which should help raise the profile of the group and also Asperger’s syndrome.

We are celebrating the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth and World Autism Awareness Day on April 2nd with a talk by our members about Evolution. We hope to gain some publicity about this too seeing as Shrewsbury was the birthplace of Charles Darwin!

It is all go now for Autonomy!

We were very fortunate to receive a £500 cheque from the Shrewsbury Round Table this month – this money has paid for a new projector for our laptop. Now we don’t have to borrow projectors from other organisations and can be totally independent with our training.

Another positive is that Sara hopes to attend a meeting with Staffordshire Pitch your Project winners, the Lighthouse group in Stafford this coming Wednesday. The Jigsaw group are also coming to the meeting, so we will have a lot to talk about. It is interesting that our groups have so much in common – we would not be meeting up with each other if we had not attended the Pitch Your Project prize giving presentation at Staffordshire hospital in November!

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.

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!

We decided to raise the profile of Autonomy again this month during National Autism Week (Oct 6-10^th). 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.

]]> http://www.journeystohealth.org/national-autism-week/feed/ 1 http://www.journeystohealth.org/catching-up-with-autonomy/ http://www.journeystohealth.org/catching-up-with-autonomy/#comments Mon, 13 Oct 2008 10:08:58 +0000 sara http://www.journeystohealth.org/?p=261

To celebrate the gifts talents of our members, we ran a Living Our Lives day. This was a new venture for us as a group. Could we run a day on our own and deal with all the bookings, finances, delegate packs and paperwork without the support of other organisations? We wanted to try a session of our own – a celebration of Asperger’s syndrome run by Eric, Danny and Mark all who have different skills. Eric is a musician, Danny is a photographer and Mark is a poet. It was a great day but unfortunately we ran at a small loss as not enough people turned up – but it was a real learning experience for us all.

We promoted Living Our Lives via the Internet, via our website and contacted the Shropshire Star, Radio Shropshire and the Shrewsbury Chronicle. We had some interest from community groups, and other parents, but no interest and no mentioning of the session in any of the media. How can we change this another time?

We apologise for not having our entries on the blog earlier as we have had some communication and technical problems, but here we go.

September 15th

Winning the £2000 prize has meant a real boost for volunteering activities for Autonomy members but even having won the prize money we are still having difficulty encouraging the media to notice our group. I suppose adults with autism and Asperger’s syndrome are not as newsworthy as children or pets!

On the day we won the prize I contacted the local radio, who were running some news items on children with autism and Asperger’s syndrome. I was told that the information about our prize would be passed around and picked up by some other programme presenters. This has not materialised.