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

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?

Training part 2

Over the last few weeks we have looked at TV and newspapers. We have compared how different channels show news stories and then checked to see how newspapers tell the same stories. We looked at some of the things in people's lives, how we could make a story out of what we found out, and perhaps very importantly how we could get a journalist to show an interest.

We had a giggle when looking at newspapers, we asked people to turn the page and say what caught their eye first. Poor Peter and Rob had the Sun in front of them and we all knew what was coming! Still it was a very interesting exercise, try it sometime: turn the page and note what catches your eye. This helped to illustrate why journalists and advertisers like to get their stories on pages 1, 3, 5 or 7. The eye will naturally scan the right side of a paper as the pages are turned. This is why key stories, photos or ads are usually found here...unless of course you have the Sun in front of you.

We wanted to see what it was like to be journalists or an editor. Everyone was given a subject to research, using old papers. Rosie was voted editor and Peter was chosen as the picture editor. The aim was to put together our own paper, within a deadline, using cuttings from the old papers. Everyone got stuck in, we all felt the pressures that editors must feel, so maybe we might cut them a bit of slack next time we have a story for the local press.