Thought I would post a blog post now to say welcome to my blog , this is the second time I have created a blog, the first went wrong by rechanging passwords and then I didnt remember how to sign back into it , so have created a new one.
My old one is still in the google archives so if you wanted to see how much of a mad cap world I lived in and my views , you can do , but be warned to have a lot of tissues as some posts may be funny , shocking and just plain silly. Disabled role models were mentioned back then a lot and I dont see many people mentioned in it any more. Take a look at http://www.personaleyeview.blogspot.com if you dare!
Anyway , to open this new blog , I wanted to tell all of you about something exciting, I work with a charity in Hertfordshire which helps disabled people to live independently , and I am a support co ordinator for it.
Recently I have been asked my manager in this senior role to set up a summer job forum which will help young disabled adults to understand the reality of work by using creative media , and to organise adult visitors , some with disabilities and some without to tell their work stories, and to answer questions from tthe young disabled people aged 16 to 25.
We did the summer job forum last year but this time I decided to invite people that had even more of a story to tell , and being the sort of person I am with contacts , I decided to invite my childhood hero and someone who frequently appeared in the old blog (if he reads this he'll fin d my old posts very funny, especially he awards post which is shameful but thats me at the time!) , anyhow last Weds was when he visited to tell his work story, and I was chairing the session.
Listening to his work story , I soon discovered lots of things that I never knew about discrimination and access that wheelchair users like Mik have to put up with and it shocked me , and the way he told the story was that he was very empathic and telling it in a way that was very democratic , as he had put up with lots of discrimination as he did things , like access when he shot music videos and just crawling downstairs into nightclubs just so he could be like any other clubber.
Now being a dedicated disability rights campaigner as I am , I was really interested in these stories and empathised with all the heartache that he must had trying to do things and then things getting in his way. The best thing was though , he had stood up for himself and made the law change by going to these building regulatirs and changing things for the better , by being a access consultant. Great!
He also told us two things which I had experienced where he said "Never let knock backs hold you down" and "Stand up for what you want , because you will get that dream job if you so want it" .
The session concluded with a great media theme which he had thought up on the nspot and was really "user driven" which is what we try to be at Herts PASS and overcome barriers to work.
The afternoon session was ;pretending we were in a mock TV show and we had all the usual roles that people would do on set , eg. presenters, cameraman (in our case, camerawoman) , and a floor manager played by Mik himself brilliantly and very hilariously!
All in all , a great session which had the right criteria we were about , being user driven , overcoming barriers to work, and generally finding out things we had never known before.
And Nigel my manager needn't have worried about it when he went away on holiday because it started the job forum off well and he would have been very impressed with me in the way I handled everything.
Sometimes I think he doesnt have faith in me , but there you go! I have the agendas , pictures , work to prove it well , and if I did need reassurance I did spot Mik wink at me when were writing on the flipchart and working out everyone's role in the role play.
No comments:
Post a Comment