Stay Up Late campaign – Celebrating 10 years
How we celebrated 10 years of the Stay Up Late campaign
Victoria our new quality checker and Kate spent the day in Victoria’s home town of Bognor Regis to get to know each other, think about how to promote gig buddies there, and reflect on the Annual General Meeting (AGM).
It was a sunny morning and the pubs in the centre of town were just opening up for business so we decided to start with some flyer-ing. Victoria said some pubs in bognor are hard to get in if you don’t have the right ID. Like Luc explained at our AGM during the open space discussion, if you don’t have a drivers license or you don’t want to take out your passport in fear of it getting lost it can be very difficult to get in places. We at gig buddies are going to talk to our local council about the rules around this to see if we can help make it easier for people with learning disabilities to get in.
Whatever happens is perfect!
We agreed we won’t be able to make all the ideas from the AGM happen but we liked making it possible for all ideas to be heard and explain properly if we couldn’t make any if them happen. Where as the idea of a gig buddies theme park was popular the reality is we don’t have the funding to make things like that possible but we can look at organising socials to an already existing theme park for now!
And we have talked for months about how we could make an accessible app for gig buddies and really want to make this happen so have committed to having a meeting about this.
Who ever attends are the right people!
We had about 40 people attend this year – a mixture of staff, volunteers, participants, parents, friends and professionals.
Victoria said ‘I really liked Joy’s idea of doing more art workshops. I’d like to help make workshops happen and organise my own socials in Bognor and eventually be able to run some events independently.’ This is great to hear and I’m impressed with Victoria’s commitment to the role and that she is already setting herself goals.
“I’m glad I got to come to my first Stay up Late gig too at the green door store. When I was working on the door with Kate and The Revs started playing I saw the queue and I said Kate ‘I’ve got this! I have control. I can do this – you go in and watch the band! I said to the other volunteers it’s getting busy and I need to do this quickly- once I’ve got the queue down you guys can start helping again.”
This attitude is what makes Victoria such a great project worker – she uses initiative and isn’t afraid to takes charge of situations. She wants to get to the stage where she doesn’t need support and we are proud of being able to provide her an opportunity to develop these skills.
“I liked it when you had to go to tidy up after the AGM and you said I’m leaving Victoria in charge.”
I want the other volunteers to know I’m a member of staff and although I have a learning disability people can come to me for help too, not just you and Madeline. If I don’t know how to do something then I’ll come and ask you but I hope soon people will come to me if they need support.’ I told Victoria that it just takes people a little bit of time to get to know her and when she needed help sorting out her train travel and I offered, she she no thanks I want Madeline to do it as she knows about my travel! Victoria said ‘did that hurt your feelings?’ No it didn’t, of course, and Madeline is a train expert indeed, but I wanted Victoria to see we all need time to put our trust in before we ask them for help, and that’s ok.
How it all began
Victoria told me
‘I saw the heavy load movie last night and I was overwhelmed. It was amazing to see where the band came from and how it’s influenced Stay Up Late.
I liked Jimmy – he has such a caring heart. It was hard watching the band split up but that does happen in bands and to see how they turned the work from the band into a charity was really amazing.
I would say Paul is at the heart of the charity – if it wasn’t for Paul keeping it going we wouldn’t all be working. He’s the original band member. He took them to places to get stay up late to be a charity. It really helped my understanding of why we are doing what we do, and i feel it will help me talk about the charity to other people.
It was an emotional journey watching it and inspiring to see how it started. Now I’ve seen the movie I’d say to people stay up late is about people wanting to go to gigs and they can’t because they don’t have support – but stay up late helps people stay out more. This wouldn’t have happened if stay up late hadnt have started. Me, I wouldn’t mind because I know how to get home. When I used to go clubbing until 4am -them where the days! I knew I could stay up late. But I know I sometimes can’t stay out because of transport. Like the AGM in Brighton I had to leave at 9:30 to get a train back to Bognor. So I know what it’s like.”
Looking back at that movie and what’s changed since then, it’s been 10 years since we started the campaign and we now have Gig Buddies in Sydney and hope to have it all over the uk. In the AGM we talked about how to help make people’s lives great in the next 10 years and the gig buddies project is a good example of how we can make life better for people with learning disabilities.
We went to visit one of our volunteers whilst in Bognor who has had some struggles with the support service his gig buddy accesses. Victoria says
“People need to remember gig buddies volunteers are not there to fill in as support workers when they are short staffed. It makes me angry that that service has made our volunteer feel like that. We need to look after our volunteers. They give up their free time, they put their heart into it because they want to do it.”
“We should make a film about what staff at gig buddies do and what the role of the volunteer is. And how the volunteers make a difference to people’s lives – from sitting indoors all day to going out.”
We finish the day having visited several venues and set up 3 meetings for future partnership working in 2017 all instigated by Victoria. We are both excited about the prospect of spreading the work of gig buddies into the Bognor area and putting into action all the great ideas from the AGM.
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