Founded and chaired by Professor the Baroness Sheila Hollins, Beyond Words (Books Beyond Words Community Interest Company) has nearly 30 years of experience supporting people with learning disabilities to explore, understand and fully participate in their world.
The Books Beyond Words series of picture books are stories about real life, read individually or in groups, to empower people with intellectual and developmental disabilities to flourish in our often confusing, information-driven world, ensuring that their experiences and voices are heard and valued.
The series has been produced for more than 27 years, currently having 50 titles, incorporating 400 scenarios with over 1900 pictures. Books cover issues ranging from health, relationships and crime, to community living. When using these stories, people with learning disabilities discover they can access and share knowledge about their lives, feelings, and challenges. The books:
In this way, Beyond Words pioneers a method of facilitating communication, accessing knowledge and enabling people with learning disabilities and communication difficulties to enjoy more opportunities to participate in their own lives and communities.
The books remove barriers to understanding by using no words at all, presenting pictures in a story narrative, building on each person’s visual literacy. The books are also designed to make the relationship between supporter or professional and the person with learning disabilities more equal. They give the power to the person with learning disabilities by enabling them to hold, read and 'own' the book-without-words and the unique story they discover in it.
The book-without-words, plus the changed power-relationship, creates an empowering dynamic. It changes the self-perception of the person with intellectual disabilities from ‘I can’t read’ to ‘I am a reader’ which, in turn, changes the way people with intellectual disabilities are perceived by those around them: transforming from passive to active players in their own lives.
Our primary activity is to produce our series of unique picture books.
Beyond Words also provides training and guidance about how to use the books for supporters, families, carers, clinicians, advocacy workers, people with learning disabilities as well as health and social care professionals.
For the past three years we have been establishing Book Clubs in places such as libraries, schools and hospital inpatient treatment programmes.
