Ealing
Ealing Mencap Š 2012 Levi Richards
ANNUAL REPORT 2012
It’s that time again... ...and it’s hard to believe that yet another year has gone by since I was writing my bit for the annual report and we celebrated our first AGM at the new Enterprise Lodge. It’s been a very busy year for Ealing Mencap, and it’s no secret that we are operating in a very different funding world and have had to make lots of changes. Some of these were due to cuts and others were because we just needed to adapt to remain an effective voluntary sector organisation within Ealing. We now have four distinctive areas within our organisation each with a specific focus. These are Services, Access, Business Development and Business Support. Look out for the colour coded frames as you read through our report. In September our Trustees and Service Managers came together to think about the direction and scope of our organisation over the long-term. We came up with lots of ideas that will help us develop a five year Ealing Mencap strategy.
We all know that change is not easy and we also know that it is even more difficult for some of the people we support. That’s why I’m asking everyone involved to help us fine tune our vision for the future. We can’t have a strategy that is fit for purpose unless we listen to what people want and need us to be there for. I hope you enjoy our Annual Report this year. Many of the designs and artwork featured are from our customers, some contributed and some paid commissions, and we’re delighted to have them on display here. What better way is there to reflect our organisation, than in the creativity and skills of the people who use our services? “Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the USA
Despite the changes outlined, I really feel we continue to offer exciting opportunities, inclusive support, and act as the voice of learning disability in Ealing. Lesley Dodd - Executive Director
Portrait of Lesley by Keith Miller
RealMe There’s been changes within the Step and Value Life services in the past year. We decided that we can offer a better experience to both sets of customers by working together and after consultation with our customers we are now called RealMe. Based at Enterprise Lodge we provide customers with a range of opportunities to develop life skills and deliver employment training, through a choice of meaningful activities and experiences. RealMe now offer a variety of person centred activities and courses, allowing customers to create something that suits their needs. An approach which moves customers towards new outcomes through training, confidence building and skills development. Our activities and training programme consist of small groups of
Studying the heart in a biology group
customers working with our team to create a pathway to employment. We also seek the right employment opportunities for the right people and campaign for real change within mainstream employment. Customers will also have the opportunity to work within our social enterprises and set up their own businesses. You can use your personal budget or purchase privately and we have a number of limited places for people with learning disabilities who are interested in employment but are not in receipt of any funding.
RealMe Our new training sessions will develop our customers’ skills and prepare them for different workplace environments. We’ve been running training sessions in gardening, cleaning, computer skills, events management, bike maintenance, retail, cookery and travel training and we’ll be adding to these soon. Our social enterprise development service supports customers to participate in, or set up, their own business with the aim of offering self-employment in a way that works for them. We currently run an a cycle hire project, events management group, gardening and cleaning service and football academy – all run by and involving people who have learning disabilities.
Kevin Prior and Mark Clerkin on a computer skills course
RealMe offer a range of sessions, including: •
Respite
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Leisure activities
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Health and fitness
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Experiencing new places and things
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Training
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Employment preparedness
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Voluntary work experience
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Access to paid employment
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Setting up and working for Social Enterprises
Children’s Activities Over the last year, the Saturday Club has offered a term–time, weekly service at Enterprise Lodge, giving parents and carers a bit of time off in the afternoon and chance for their children to engage in free-play sessions in a supported environment at Enterprise Lodge. Unfortunately we’ve had to say goodbye to the Saturday Club in this format but, never fear, we’re not going to be losing our children’s services altogether. We’ve recently received funding for some adventure play equipment and we’re looking at ways in which we can combine this with the amazing space at Enterprise Lodge to give children the chance to let their imaginations soar. Look out for more info soon!
Local musician, David Stone, running a session at the Summer Open Day
Travelling alone It’s been a year marked by change in the Travel Training and Travel Buddy projects, and we’ve looked at how we can push both forward in the future. Funding this year meant that for a time we were restricted to offering travel training only to people on school transport, but thanks to some money from John Lyon’s Charity we’ve been able to be more flexible with what we do. For example, we’ve held travel workshops with parents and carers and launched our parent pack, all designed to help ease some of the natural worries and concerns they face when deciding if travel training is right for their child. The good thing is that we can work towards overcoming those issues at the right time,
Jake Mroczek and when their children are Luke Radclyffe on their first travel training session. nine or ten, before they become too reliant upon laid-on transport in a few years’ time. By then, it becomes very difficult to start travel training. Other than that, we’ve also become a service that you can buy with an individual budget, which again opens up the possibilities of independent travel to more people.
Demand for Travel Buddying has been huge this year, so much so that we’re linking in with RealMe to be able to train new buddies and provide real work opportunities. We’re really hoping to see Travel Buddying grow and grow. Again, with individual budgets we’re now able to build a service for someone in a person-centred way.
DAB
020 88
40 857
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The Disability Advice Bureau has continued to offer advice and advocacy to people with learning disabilities and their carers, with our partners ECIL taking the lion’s share of the advice work, and Ealing Mencap handling more of the advocacy side. We’ve worked a lot with carers and the people they’re caring for going through the overview assessment process. This is supposed to take six weeks, but has taken closer to two years in some cases, so by being there DAB has helped guide people through what can prove to be a long and complicated procedure. On a wider scale our advocates also support the Carers Action Group, raise issues at the partnership board, and lead campaigns, the biggest one this year being the closure of respite beds at
Green Lane which is still on-going. The Carers Action Group have had some success on this issue by attending meetings, raising concerns, holding local authority officers to account and letting them know that they are being carefully monitored by the people who have got the most to lose in council cutbacks. Our biggest single area of support has been housing. We’ve been fortunate to have funding for a specialist housing worker which has been a massive benefit to us. With someone on board with an in-depth knowledge of housing law, knowing what the council’s duties are and what they are obliged to offer, we’ve got a lot more teeth when it comes to getting people housed. We’ve also made plans to develop a base at the Lido Centre in West Ealing which will give us a great base to operate drop-in sessions and offer our support to a wider range of people, so look out for us there as well as at the Carers’ Centre soon.
Transition Our most exciting development has been the move to Westside, the replacement for the old W13 Youth Club. It means that we’re right in the heart of the youth service in Ealing, so we’ve been able to work hand-in-hand with other groups to really get young people hooked into the right support quickly and without being stigmatised as Westside is a mainstream provision. We’ve had very good support from Connexions in that other boroughs have had their service cut to the bone, financially, but although in Ealing they’ve lost premises they’ve hung onto staff including the Ealing Mencap managed people, which is testament to the work we’ve done and recognition of the importance
of having specialist workers with the right experience to be able to handle the intensive support that people with learning disabilities sometimes require. After a big mention in last year’s report, Synergy celebrated the end of its first year in October, and we asked young people to look back and say what had gone well, what not so well, and to plan for the future. Everyone felt that they’d had some choices and options that they hadn’t before thanks to Synergy, so we’re definitely moving in the right direction. Jason Wicks with one of the props for the Synergy Halloween movie.
Green & Clean Over the last few months we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to refresh Green & Clean, our original social enterprise which concentrated on gardening and cleaning councilowned homes and sheltered accommodation in Ealing. While Green & Clean operated with reasonable success as a business, we felt that we could do more with it to offer paid employment and work placements to people with learning disabilities, and expand the services that we can offer. We count Ealing Council, Interserve and ECIL as customers, and we’re looking to add more. At present, half of Green & Clean’s employees have a learning disability and we want to see this number grow and grow.
We were lucky to receive a grant Social Enterprise Investment Fund this year in a joint bid with Accession, a grant which has enabled us to purchase greenhouses and gardening equipment to improve our gardening training and launch a garden farming project under the Green & Clean banner.
Before...
...after!
On your bike
Left to right: David Morris, Vijay Dham, Kenny Renwick and Katie Coombes
In September we celebrated the launch of On Your Bike, designed to be an all-ability, community cycle hire scheme. Since the launch, we have worked tirelessly to develop On Your Bike from an idea, to a fully functioning social enterprise run by people with learning disabilities. On Your Bike staff attend weekly training sessions in bike maintenance – supported by a fully qualified expert from Ealing Bike Hub - and cycle road safety. The scheme has provided 40min cycle sessions for as many as 15 different paying customers at £3 per person, with sessions being run also for the RealMe service. There are several different types of accessible bike making it easy to find a bike that suits your needs.
Looking ahead, we aim to have a sleeker and more established cycle hire service in 2013, with fully trained staff at the helm, equipped with the necessary ‘know how’ and confidence to carry the business through to being selfsustaining whilst providing paid employment for its staff.
Time to rock n’ roll I Love Thunder have had a brilliant year, managing to squeeze in eight gigs at various venues in and around Ealing, from the Brentford St. George’s Day Festival in April to the Harrow Disability Arts Festival in November. We’ve also been on a trip to see ‘We Will Rock You’. We’ve been learning lots of new songs and have also written our first number – ‘I Love Thunder’! The band have also won several funding awards. First was a Let’s Do It Award from Barclays and Ealing Gazette and recently a BBC Performing Arts Fund Award, which meant a lot to us, as only 47 groups were chosen in the whole country. The idea is to use the money to invite local bands and musicians to come and jam, share tips and their experience.
I Love Thunder at a recent rehearsal Photo by Grant Humphreys at Ealing Gazette
We are proud members of the Dissimillis family and use their colour coding system to help our musicians play. We’re really pleased with the results and hope to run some workshops this year to share our love! The band is run on a voluntary basis and relies on donations to keep gigging! So if you can help... Videos, gigs and more on www.facebook.com/ilovethunder.theband
Work and learn Ealing Mencap recognises the skills that young people have and know how hard it can be to find employment, especially if they are interested in working in health and social care. We are working with local training providers to identify interested young people between the ages of 16 and 24 and provide paid employment opportunities for them. Lauren and Chloe are two of our current apprentices and we talked to them about their experience working with us. What attracted you to the apprenticeships at Ealing Mencap? Lauren: I wanted to work with people who have learning disabilities and work in the care sector. As an apprentice I’m able to work and learn at the same time, which is better for me as I find I’m always learning whilst I work.
Chloe: I did work experience at Ealing Mencap and really liked it, so when the chance came up to become an apprentice I thought it would be a good opportunity to do something I enjoyed and also get an NVQ level 2 qualification at the same time. It suited me better to do this whilst working rather than in a college. Here, I’ve been learning everything and doing it straight away. Would you recommend doing an apprenticeship at Ealing Mencap to anyone? Chloe: Yes, if they’re interested in learning disabilities then Ealing Mencap is a great place to learn.
Below: Chloe Kilty and Lauren Radford
Well done, you three... There is always so much good work going on at Ealing Mencap but the following three merit special mention this year. Ealing Mencap customer Tom Thacker celebrated this Summer as one of the torchbearers for the Olympic Games. Tom, said: “It was an honour to be chosen, it was a really busy day but a great experience. Actually holding the torch itself was a very special feeling.” Berge Kanikanian has finished filming his documentary about how people with disabilities were treated by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Berge’s plan is to show the documentary to students as a way of reducing hate crime and discrimination against people who have learning disabilities.
Brenda Perks, our longstanding Treasurer, met actress Barbara Windsor at the Team London Volunteer Awards ceremony, when she was nominated for an award in the ‘Long Standing Commitment’ category. Brenda has been looking after the money for as long as any of us can remember. Well done to all three!
Left: Barbara Windsor and Brenda Perks Middle: Berge Kanikanian Right: Tom Thacker
What next?
Right: The Trustees and Service Managers hard at work.
The Service Managers and Trustees put their heads together in September last year to lay the foundations of what we hope will become a five year strategy for Ealing Mencap. In the last few years we’ve seen the rise of direct payments and personal budgets as well as cuts to traditional grant-funding, which has meant we’ve needed to adapt and change some of the ways that we deliver services. Of course this is an on-going process, which is why we hope by having a five year plan we’ll be ready for anything the future throws at us and still be able to work flexibly and effectively for the people who come to us for support or guidance. We will need your help to make sure that we’re heading in the right direction though, so please let us know what you think we can do to ensure that we’re offering the best possible services.
Who do I talk to? Here are the contacts for the key people in each area at Ealing Mencap. Please check our website for other staff members. As a rule of thumb, should you wish to email someone at Ealing Mencap, use their first name and surname separated by a dot, followed by @ealingmencap.org.uk.
Lesley Dodd – Executive Director The Lido Centre, 63 Mattock Lane, West Ealing W13 9LA 020 8280 2222 www.ealingmencap.org.uk Registered Charity No. 1054061 Company No. 3039319
Services Alison Murphy – Manager Haydn Morris-Leveque Senior Care Coordinator Kate Kilty Senior Support Worker Enterprise Lodge, Stockdove Way, Perivale, Greenford, Middlesex UB6 8TJ 020 8566 9575
Access
Business Development
Business Support
Jennifer Moseley – Manager
Matthew Coulam – Manager
Maureen Schofield – Manager
Gabriel Jones Transition Manager Matt Gamble Travel Training Manager
Beckie Moore Employment and Social Enterprise Lead Shalini Sawhney Employment and Training Coordinator Adrian Ford Social Enterprise Development Worker
Claudia Omisore Customer Referrals and Assessment Coordinator Maurice Elliott Resource and Quality Assurance Coordinator
The Lido Centre, 63 Mattock Lane, West Ealing W13 9LA 020 8280 2222 Lesley Beck 3Cs Counselling Ealing Carers’ Centre, 44 South Ealing Road, Ealing W5 4QA 020 8840 8573
Enterprise Lodge, Stockdove Way, Perivale, Greenford, Middlesex UB6 8TJ 020 8566 9575
Also encompasses Personnel and Business Administration (Human Resources, IT Support, and Volunteering) Enterprise Lodge, Stockdove Way, Perivale, Greenford, Middlesex UB6 8TJ 020 8566 9575
Accounts The income and expenditure figures are not comparable this year because 2011 included the capital income and expenditure on Enterprise Lodge. Grants received for services were slightly down this year but we are optimistic about next year even though operating conditions for charities are difficult. Our balance sheet remains strong with assets of over £1m. Our full audited accounts can be obtained from our registered office or viewed on the Charity Commission’s website. We gratefully acknowledge revenue funding from BIG Lottery, Ealing Council, Ealing PCT, Sports England, London Bike Hub, Help A Capital Child, John Lyons, City Bridges Trust, London Marathon Charitable Trust and numerous donations from members. Also we would like to thank our customers for spending their personal budgets and direct payments with us.
Income Grants received Donations and gifts Investment income Other income Total income Expenditure Charitable expenditure Governance costs Interest paid Administration costs Other costs Total expenditure Net resources expended Net assets
2012 1,236,136 81,384 1,182 3,710 1,325,412
2011 2,362,525 42,030 1,077 4,225 2,409,857
1,293,553 16,114 13,537 64,733 202 1,388,139 (62,727) 1,022,641
2,556,073 14,850 57,192 158 2,628,273 (218,416) 1,083,013
Austerity continues to dominate the economic landscape and people with learning disabilities and their families face uncertainties regarding both benefits and support services as the government looks to save even more money. We continue to remind politicians that they do have choices when making decisions about where to make savings and that services for the most vulnerable people in our society should not be reduced. Major Mencap campaigns have focussed on reducing hate crime and bullying, continuing the improvements to the way people with learning disabilities are treated and supported in the health service and ending the abuse exposed in the media recently. Locally we have supported carers to maintain short breaks services and continue to support people with learning disabilities to speak up about their concerns about the support they receive. As expected, it has been a challenging year and it will take a while for our management restructure to fully bed in. I would like to thank all of our staff, trustees and volunteers for their support – our continuing success is due to a huge team effort and as our report demonstrates, we have many achievements and successes to be proud of and celebrate this year. In it’s first full year of operation, Enterprise Lodge has been hugely successful and popular to the extent that we now need to look to extend our capacity to support more customers with their own personal budgets. Only a very small percentage of people with learning disabilities have a paid job but many are more than capable of full or part-time employment. We want to provide more opportunities through developing social enterprises. These are just a few of the challenges we will be facing over the coming months – never a dull moment at Ealing Mencap! George Venus - Chairman
Portrait of George Venus by Keith Miller
Ealing
Main Office The Lido Centre 63 Mattock Lane West Ealing W13 9LA 020 8280 2222
Enterprise Lodge Stockdove Way London UB6 8TJ 020 8566 9575
All artwork in the Annual Report was created by members of the Real Me Art Group or members of the BLP Art Collective, who are: Keith Miller, Gemma Feltell, Paljit Thiara, Sukhdev Bansal, John Keavney, Michael Fairclough Shadrock John, Zubin Anadani, Hope Willems and Vincent Wise www.ealingartscollective.blogspot.co.uk Cover artwork by Levi Richards www.lazfar.wordpress.com
Š 2012 Levi Richards
www.ealingmencap.org.uk
