Life in the Community

Life in the Community was a three year project funded by the Mental Health Foundation and the Baily Thomas Charitable Fund to find out how people with higher support needs could be helped to build relationships with their local communities.

We had four partners on the project, each working with up to 10 people over a two year period:

• Brandon Trust in partnership with three separate local authorities: North Somerset, Bristol City and South Gloucestershire
• William Morrison Trust based in Darlington
• The Tamarisk Trust in the London Borough of Barnet
• Grapevine in Coventry.

Our partners’ job was to find new ways of helping these people and their families to plan for a future that relied less upon specialist learning disability services and looked more to the kind of support available to everyone. There was no one model for doing this, but a common element of the project has been the role of ‘community connectors’.  They help turn plans into action by matching the skills and interests of individuals with opportunities in local communities.

Here are just some of the features of community connecting that emerged during the project:

• It is a service best provided by small independent organisations.
• It is provided at times convenient to the ‘customer’ and their carers (often evenings and weekends) and in a variety of locations.
• Connectors spend time getting to know people with high support needs, the people who are important to them and what they want to do with their lives.

• Connectors do tasks that paid support staff rarely have the time to undertake, such as mapping community opportunities and matching them to what a person wants to do.

• Community is not just about a place (the village or neighbourhood where someone lives) or about groups (where people come together to share an interest or activity). The essence of community connecting was about building lasting relationships with other people who either live in those places and/or belong to those groups.
• They also helped family members and paid supporters to be more creative and flexible in the way they support people to make sure that such relationships can be sustained in the future. 
• Good connectors need empathy, patience, persistence, ingenuity, initiative, creativity, flexibility, resourcefulness and commitment. They should also have local knowledge and be skilled at introducing themselves and the people they support in new situations.

In each year of the Life in the Community project, we have held a Building Community Networks conference for people to come together and share ideas. The last Building Community Networks was held in February 2009.

More information

If you would like to find out about our training and consultancy work to enable people with high support needs to be involved in their communities contact Paul Swift pswift@fpld.org.uk or Molly Mattingly mmattingly@fpld.org.uk.

The project has been made possible with the help of a 3-year action research grant from the Mental Health Foundation and The Baily Thomas Charitable Fund

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