Alan and Michael are snap happy

Michael Smith, and Alan Hobden, both won certificates in the photography section of the annual Nuneaton Festival of Arts, and collected them at a ceremony last Friday. Michael got a certificate for third place in the still life category, and Alan won third place in portrait as well as a merit in action. This is the 1st time Alan or Micheal have entered a mainstream photography competition, although both exhibited work at the Herbert Art Gallery, in Covnetry, last Autumn, as part of a touring exhibition of contemporary photography from the Victoria and Albert.
Michael said, “I’m very excited at winning a certificate and hope I win one of the trophies next year”, while Alan added, “I can’t believe it, I didn’t expect to win”.
Their certificates were presented by Nuneaton’s Mayor, Councillor Gerald Smith, who also posed for photographs with Alan and Michael after the ceremony, and even gave them both a short ride around the block in his chauffeur-driven car – something Alan and Michael enjoyed almost as much as collecting their awards.

expanding the blogging

We have been so busy helping other groups to set up blog sites that we haven't been too good at updating this site. In the last couple of weeks we have worked with two other groups to show them how to blog and then set up their own blogs. Hopefully we will have more people with learning disabilities joining the fun.

Giving parents a chance

A while ago we mentioned that we were working on a campaign to investigate the problems faced by parents with learning disabilities and issues around not being given a chance to be parents. One of our team has had the sad experience of having both her children removed from her when they were babies. She has decided to be the face of our campaign and a 2 page feature appeared in the Coventry Telegraph yesterday. As well as the interview with Christine, there is an interview with 2 advocates who have supported a number of people through the courts, trying to keep their children. To keep the feature balanced there is a response from the Director of Coventry City Council Children services. to read this feature please follow the link. We would welcome your comments, or examples of practice in your area.
http://snipurl.com/f2eg6

Taking blogging a bit further

As part of the press office work we offer other groups support and help in getting their voices heard by the media. We have been talking to different groups in the West Midlands about how we can help them. One thing people seem interested in is learning how to blog and so we have begun to visit people and give them chance to see just how easy it can be.

Today we visited a group based at Curriers Enterprise in Coventry and worked with 6 people. Some had used the internet before, others had never used a computer before. By the end of the session everyone had checked out our chattervine.blogspot.com site and four people felt OK about leaving comments.

Over the next few weeks we will help the group look for other blogs that interest them and also set up a blog for people based at Curriers to share all their exciting news.

Over the next few weeks we will be visiting other groups but if your group would like to hear how the media team can support you please get in touch.

Picking up the bits

This blog and the media team have been put on hold for a couple of months because I have been laid up with a broken foot. Zoe, Lynne & Rob have done a fantastic job in keeping the media team training going but now we are ready to get down to some serious campaigning with the team.
We have decided that Heavy Load's Stay Up Late campaign is really important and so we are going to see what we can do at a local level to help. Tomorrow the team are going to watch the Heavy Load film and start to think about what is going on in Coventry and Warwickshire. I'm sure most of the team will have a story or 2 about their own experiences on not being able to stay up late. We are also interested in the new campaign by Leonard Cheshire called social care matters and will think about how we can help support this. Both campaigns fit together because the reason people can't stay up late is because they don't have access to good/flexible social care.
If you don't know about either of these national campaigns take a look at these 2 websites and watch the Heavy Load film on BBC IPlayer (it was originally shown on BBC3 Storyville 9th Feb.)
http://www.lcdisability.org/?lid=9069
http://www.mencap.org.uk/case.asp?id=8599
Our other big challenge is getting people to read and comment on our 2 blogsites so if you can help with promoting this please do.
www.chattervine.blogspot.com
Denise

accessing the internet

We are always interested to hear about projects that aim to make the internet more accessible to people with learning disabilities. Recently we were told of a project that uses QR codes, but we hadn't a clue what they were. Here is a link to a short video that makes it a little clearer.
http://thebigtree.org/blog/?p=66

Hi Zoë here.!
I have been running the Media Team and it has been fun. I have really enjoyed it. But Denise has not been there because she is off with a broken foot hopefully she will be back soon. The grapevine Christmas party was really good and it was nice to see everyone. We had a great time. We are on week 13 already it has been good as Rob has been supporting me to do them, we have made a TV lifestyle program with the media team, interviews also
Made our own news paper with them. We have quizzes everyone has a good time. It will be good when Denise get’s back as we have all miss her, it has been good experience for me I am very pleased with myself and rob should be really pleased with himself to.

That’s all for now
Zoë