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

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

parents with learning disabilities

We are shortly about to go public with a campaign about parents with learning disabilities having their children taken away. The team have conducted some research and are working with a feature reporter for the Coventry Telegraph. One of our team is willing to be a case story and her personal story will be central to the feature. Once we are ready to go live with the story I will post the link here. If you know of any similar articles or cases please do contact us.

Quick catch up

It has been very busy in the media office recently, we are getting ready for our first big PR campaign and have lots of things planned for the next few weeks. The team have also had a training day at BBC Coventry and Warwickshire and they are going to talk about that on their chattervine.blogspot.com site. I thought the BBC training day was very good we were given chance to look at using the internet, learnt about how to catch the attention of editors with our press releases- who would have thought it is common for an editor to get 500 emails a day! We also had a go in the radio studio doing interviews with each other- great practice for the ones we have planned for the next few weeks.

We have just held a photography competition for people with learning disabilities living in Coventry or Warwickshire and had over 90 entries, with many very good photographs sent to us- there is lots of talent out there. I'm just glad that I was only organising the competition not doing the judging! Still after a couple of hours on Monday our 4 judges finally chose the winners and we have launched a website with all the entries on it: www.flickr.com/photos/grapevinecomp2008

All the photos are going on public display from 16th-30th June in Coventry Council House and the Lord Mayor is presenting the trophies on Tuesday 17th, hopefully with our local press in force. The competition is just a small part of the things we have planned for Learning Disability week starting 15th June.

The team have designed some hanging expression walls which are going in public spaces in Coventry & Nuneaton. The idea is for people to come along and write comments about what learning disability means to them. The biggest wall is going in the BBC open centre in Coventry and we are hoping that as well as it being featured on the morning show of 16th June that the TV cameras might be around.

The BBC have really championed our cause and are giving us live interviews during the week covering a wide variety of stories. We also have a live interview on Hillz FM radio, a Coventry based community radio who are celebrating their live FM licence at the same time. They have offered Paul his own show during the 1st week of their FM month and perhaps he might get to do shows for the other 3 weeks.
As things happen we will keep this blog updated so please do visit often, and tell us what you think. Denise

survey results

Thanks to everyone who took the time to take part in our survey. 53% of you thought that people with learning disabilities hardly got a mention in the media. So how do we change this?

Spastic King

Just before Christmas Channel 4 (Nov 22nd) showed a short film called The Spastic King, made by IWC Media; directed by Peter Mackie Burns and starring With Andrew Stafford as Toby - a man with learning disabilities fearful of being evicted from the family home after the death of his mother.
Our group watched this and found it both insulting and confusing. The programme was listed as showing the struggles faced by the character Toby after his mother dies. However, our group were insulted by the use of the term spastic, as Toby self-titles himself throughout the programme. The team know that people can call themselves whatever they want but using spastic seems to undo lots of good work in using terms that people are happy with, this programme seems to say it's ok to call someone a spastic, and teh team don't think it is. The team felt that the character was shown to be a horrible man and that anyone who doesn't know about learning disability watching would get a bad idea about people with learning disabilities. We know that some people think that people with learning disabilities are loving and always nice or shouldn't be interested in sex, and this programme challenged that, which was a good. As part of our project we hope to show that these ideas are stereotypes and that people with learning disabilities are just as diverse as other people but we felt that the Spastic King only sent out negative images and the way the people around Toby talked about him was patronising, he wasn't a nice man but no one was honest enough to say that.
The team didn't like the way Toby was shown to live in a fantasy world, they thought people would think that people with learning disabilities are all like him. Our main problem with the programme was that it was unbalanced and we are glad that it was on very late so that not many people are likely to have watched it.
These are the views of people with learning disabilities who work on the Uncover Media Project.

How the project works

The Uncover Media Project, funded by The Big Lottery Fund, is aiming to change the way that the media portrays people with learning disabilities - including increasing coverage and hopefully changing public perceptions. As project co-ordinator my role is to support the two project workers and the volunteers we recruit to the team.
Along with the project workers, I have been adapting a University level media training course, to make it fully accessible and interactive to people with learning disabilities. Together we are learning how to be media savvy. I have to admit to having had a limited knowledge of the media and being very wary of how it all worked before starting the project. Mainly, this is based on previous experiences of how earlier projects had been dealt with.
Over the next few weeks I will share with you how the training is going and how, as a team ,we are getting ready to take on the media. We would love to hear from people working within the media, organisations that support people with learning disabilities, and of course most importantly people who have a learning disability. We would like to hear about your experiences from both sides of the issue. We would also like to hear about any positive coverage in local media, that we might otherwise miss.

Thanks, Denise