Gig Buddies; another pair celebrate their 1st year
Find out what Gig Buddies Tom and Pete got up to in their first year together. It looks like they’ve had an amazing time…
Last month we featured a great blog post from Kittie and Dean who had been celebrating their first year together as Gig Buddies. (Read it here) It caused a bit of a stir in some quarters, from a few support workers who didn’t like the critical tone of it. We don’t make any apologies for ruffling feathers – in fact if your feathers do get ruffled by articles that one you definitely do need to change the culture in your work place!
One of the important roles of a friend (or Gig Buddy) is that they’re sometimes the person who notices that things aren’t quite right at their home. They’re not spies, they just care, and if they see anything we ask them to contact us and we’ll follow it up appropriately.
Tom and Pete’s 1st year gigging together
So on to another fantastic 1 year anniversary, this time its Tom and Pete and Pete has produced a lovely memento of that year by putting together a photographic scrapbook.
And I can’t tell how happy it made us in the office to look back at their year together.
You can see a PDF of the scrapbook here.
We’ve also posted the individual pages below so you can see all the fun that they’ve been getting up to.
We’re really grateful to both Pete and Tom for all the work they do. Not only are they busy having fun loads of the time but Tom has helped us make some film interviews with his awesome questioning skills (we’ll post up more about that soon), and Tom and Pete have both just recently helped us by talking about their experiences in our volunteer training sessions.
It’s quite common for new volunteers to feedback that our training could be improved if we had some ‘real live’ Gig Buddies in on the session. Whilst we always have a participant with a learning disability co-facilitating, it’s just fantastic to have their support in this way.
You can also read more about Tom and Pete’s Gig Buddying antics on the Big Lottery’s Blog ‘Volunteering and Long-lasting friendships’ from Feb ’16.
A great quote just in from Tom too (from the recent training session):
“Gig Buddies breaking up would be like the end of a marriage, But worse!”
Beautifully put.
Paul
Enjoy the scrapbook…
