We are a Community Interest Company, motivated by our Christian faith we develop specialist and innovative projects and opportunities alongside autistic adults and those with learning disabilities and their families so they can flourish within their local communities.
Our pioneering projects creatively address the many vast health and social inequalities individuals with learning disabilities and their families face (including but not limited to; being significantly less likely to have employment opportunities or be involved in the arts or to attend worship services, whilst being significantly more likely to experience loneliness or abuse with worse physical and mental health than the general population
We want to improve these outcomes for people with learning disabilities through our organisation aims which are to: provide employment and income generating activities for individuals with learning disabilities and autism, reduce loneliness and social isolation experienced by these individuals, provide safe services to reduce incidents of abuse in this group and improve their physical and mental health needs.
Whilst we believe all people can fulfil their potential given the right support, we want to help people with learning disabilities, autism and associated complex needs who are most at risk of being marginalised from ordinary community projects and groups. People who we seek to support may ordinarily be banned from community groups due to mainstream groups not understanding or being unable to adapt to meet their needs. We want to be different and demonstrate that with the right help and support, people who have some of the most complex needs in society, can contribute as equal participants within their communities.
We do this by developing programmes and projects that foster a general atmosphere of understanding, compassion, acceptance and support for behaviours that may be perceived as challenging or socially 'out of the norm', enabling people who ordinarily struggle to be in a service to feel at ease.
We also want to train professionals and the general population to better understand learning disabilities and autism because we believe this will be an effective way to break down barriers and build capacity for more inclusive communities for people with learning disabilities and autism.
Although a small and relatively young organisation, we believe we are already making a significant impact, but we are ambitious to do a great deal more
We provide a community-based person-centred programme for a young man with complex autism; he has his own team of support workers, and we are pleased to say he is thriving
We successfully ran a local online art group for people with learning disabilities and autism during lockdown and after gaining feedback that local people would like more opportunities to develop their art, we launched our new community art school for people with learning disabilities and autism in Sept 2022. We aiming to support and develop artists to create work meaningful to them with opportunities for regular exhibitions.
We host a regular monthly inclusive worship service for people with or without learning disabilities where we are partnering with another organisation called WAVE (We are All Valued Equally) about 30 people attend this from all over Newham. We have secured funding to develop some other community projects and have a baby toddler group and a family support group in the pipeline.
We have developed a range of training packages and are currently delivering online training to 46 G.P. surgeries and Newham social care staff on 'Understanding Learning Disabilities and Autism'. We would like to develop our reach in terms of training so that we could offer training outside Newham and train voluntary sector and faith groups.
