My name is Catherine. I have been working for CHANGE as a project worker for 8 years. I am very excited to tell you about the project I am working on. It is designed to create new job opportunities for people with learning disabilities in our own services.
CHANGE is working with alongside Leeds University on a new project called Learning by Doing Together. We are exploring the creation of new jobs for people with learning disabilities in learning disabilities services. The new jobs will be ‘peer support worker’ jobs. In these jobs, people with learning disabilities will work in organisations as support workers. We want to make sure that the jobs help to empower people with learning disabilities and to improve the services that people with learning disabilities use. Three organisations want to use the skills and abilities of people with learning disabilities in their service provision.
They are working with CHANGE and Leeds University to work out how the jobs will be created. We will all work together to create new peer support worker jobs in each of the three organisations. The exciting part is that we want people with learning disabilities to be leading the project. We will organise six workshops to plan the work of creating peer support worker jobs. The workshops will take place at different points between winter 2017 and summer 2019.
The workshops are about getting everyone together. This is brilliant because different people have different types of knowledge and can contribute to the project in different ways and we really want people with learning disabilities to work with us to lead the workshops so that our ideas and priorities create new opportunities for people with learning disabilities.
If you are interested in finding more about this project, please contact me:
Catherine Carter at
Catherine@changepeople.org Telephone Number: 0113 242 6619