How can we create a network of campaigners? And what could they do?
Lots of questions and ideas already!
At our (un)Ordinary conference Stay Up Late’s Storm and Thunder Team ran a break-out, campaign workshop, session with Michael McEwan from Stay Up Late Scotland.
The purpose of the session was to find out what ideas people had for building a network of campaigners, and the sorts of activities the campaigners could get up to bring an end to people with learning disabilities not being able to stay up late.
We wanted to start something, not to come up with any answers just yet! This is a record of some of the ideas that came out of the session.
- Could there be Stay Up Late film nights? Films could be shown like the Heavy Load movie, or clips from this conference, to get people talking.
- Could we have Stay Up Late ambassadors as guest speakers at other conferences?
- People need to be able to express their life – it’s the support staff’s responsibility for how people are feeling, and they must have respect for the people they support.
- Could we go to residential homes to talk about our work?
- How can we best talk to staff to make them change the way they work so they can support people to stay up late?
- Can we lobby government and write to the House of Commons? It’s a basic human right and it’s not being met.
- How can we get a team of campaigners together so more people can stay up late?
- How can you support teams to write rotas that enable people to stay up late?
- Could you link up with the Shared Lives ambassadors to share ideas and experiences?
- How do we reach the negative people? Those staff that just don’t see there’s any way of changing things.
- Could we make all staff attend partnership board meetings?
- Can we find ways to ‘release the passion’ in support staff?
- How can we create more opportunities for people with learning disabilities to speak and tell their stories, and reach more people?
- We need to get people to sign up to the Stay Up Late manifesto for an ordinary life.
- We need to create much more opportunities like today.
- We need to have focus groups so we can discussions with people with learning disabilities and family/carers.
- Could we create an online forum which we post things on and invite councils and support staff to discuss?
So today we’re not coming up with any answers to these great and far reaching questions, but we’re certainly going to working on them as we develop our campaigning work over the year.
And the immediate next steps will be we’re holding a campaigning workshop in Brighton on 15th May. We’ll be sure to let you know what comes of that.
