|
The Realife Trust was set up in 1996 to provide a new kind of support to people with a learning difficulty and anyone else facing a range of disabling barriers in their lives. The great challenge facing the social and health care professions is to allow people who make use of support services to take more control and force services to be more responsive to their particular needs and interests.
Some of the problems facing social services and the larger voluntary organisations are to to do with staff shortages and financial restrictions. These factors cannot be made light of in these days of cut-backs, hold-backs and wholesale service re-structuring but none of this actually helps disabled people, their supporters and friends from feeling in control of the services they rely on.
With this in mind, Realife was set up to provide information, external funding expertise, training opportunities and direct support to individuals who wish to break the mould.
Our particular interests are in advocacy, person centred planning, support brokerage, supported employment, supported education and supported living arrangements, with the emphasis on total control by the people who use the services.
In our ideal world, everyone who wanted to would be able to access 'Direct Payments' (available in theory from every social services department since April 1997 - but in practice as rare as flying piggies) and particlarly the new 'Individual Budgets' initiative but in the meantime, we seek to model 'user-led' support as if the cash was actually in the persons own bank account.
Our approach is based on :
- Building wider circles of friends and supporters
- Making national consultancy available free to solve local issues
- Acting as advocates with specialist knowledge about how social service systems work
- Agreeing to provide support for as long as the person need it to ensure continuity
This last point is probably the crucial one. Inclusive communities are not built overnight.
Financial support to the Trust came originally from the Realife Partnership, which was involved in a wide variety of innovative development projects in the UK and Europe through its work with the National Development Team (NDT) and others.
Realife Trust was supported by the Partnership to act as a local action research project, supporting disabled and disadvantaged people in West Essex and East Herts to live the life of their choice. Realife is a social enterprise in it's own right - we believe we have to model best practice to support each other if we are to be able to create sustainable projects in our own community.
Today, Realife acts as a local development agency on a wide range of arts, leisure, environmental and social care sector activities with funding drawn from a wide range of sources including contracts, grant making trusts,European Social Funding and our own income generating efforts through training, consultancy, events management and trading.
In 2005, Realife staff, volunteers and trustees made an important strategic decision not to accept any further contracts from local authorities. We found that althought the contracts provided some security, they were always short term and forced the trust to accept the local authorities eligibility criteria. This often meant that some of the people who asked for our support could not be included in the funded projects and this kind of double discrimination was clearly against our founding principles.
In 2006 we set up the Inclusion Partnership Ltd as a social enterprise to take on a wider range of long term projects, allowong Realife to return to its roots as a local development agency run by and for localpeple. The Inclusion Partnership members are currently Partners in Policymaking; the National Brokerage Network; Essex Inclusive Sports Enterprise CIC , Cluzion Music and Realife.
|
