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.

exhibiting our photographs

5 young people are displaying their photographs at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry alongside a Victoria & Albert Museum touring exhibition, from 16th September until 21st October.
None of the photographers had used a SLR camera before the project and only had one month to get their photographs taken. They then had to sort through the 100's of images to pick the best 30 to be exhibited. Once this was done we had to quickly learn how to mount and frame and curate, we had less than a week to do this.
On the 18th September the Herbert held a private viewing event, attended by lots of people as well as our photographers. The reception for our part of the show was very positive. We have set up a flickr website for those that can't physically visit the Herbert.
www.flickr.com/photos/something_that_i_never_really_see

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

press attention- just like busses

Isn't it funny how you try to get some attention from someone and just when you think no one is listening you find out that they are. Last week we managed to get 2 stories in the media. The first was an article about this very blogging project and appears in Learnign Disability Practice. the second was a story about our photography competition and appeared in our local paper the Coventry Telegraph.
We also had some more good news today, BBC Coventry and Warwickshire are willing to give us some live interview slots during learning disability week June 15th-22nd; which is great for our planned positive image campaign running from now until learning disability week.
Now how do we get to appear on TV? we had a practice run last week when the team visited BBC Birmingham at the MAilbox, where we got the chance to do weather forecasts and read the news. But it would be great for the team to do it for real- any ideas?

Media team grows

The media team has grown by 8 new members. We have taken the project into Warwickshire and now have our new members. All have been recruited through Aim4, in Nuneaton and will be taking part in an open day at Aim4, Nuneaton on Thursday 20th March. They will be hosting a Big Brother Style Diary Room for visitors, we want to find out what people think about media representation of learning disability. The team will also be encouraging people to look t our 2 blog sites, hopefully we will get more people talking to us. Finally, we will have a display stand and get people involved in a bit of myth busting.

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.

About us

The Uncover media project was launched in April 2007, by Grapevine, a charity that works with people who have learning disabilities. There is one full time project coordinator and two part time project workers. At the moment we are supporting a team of 11 volunteers to learn all about the media.
Early in the project we had a design day with people from different media organisations to help us plan how the project would look if it works. The team members are all going to do work experience placements with our design partners.
So far two of the team have been on the radio and we have made a short video for The Big Lottery Fund, here is the link: http://www.biglotteryfund.org.uk/englandvideos
One of the team has just done a 2 week placement with the communications department of the city council and helped put together the bi-monthly magazine that goes out to all households in Coventry. Another member will be starting a placement working with photographers at Coventry University.
This week we are visiting a group in Sheffield to talk about blogging, because we have decided that blogging is a good way for us to get our message across. We are interested to hear from other people and what they think of the way the media shows people with learning disabilities.