Welcome to the Expanding Worlds Podcast
Recent episodes
107 Grace Eyre Profile Series – Choosing The Future
Having the right to choose how we live our lives is a fundamental human right and one that in the past many people with additional needs haven’t been given. In this episode with Paul Barker – Head of Service, Choices Brighton & Hove at Grace Eyre we discuss how to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to choose their own future. We also talk about the importance of expectations and how that is driving change.
106 Grace Eyre Profile Series – A Place To Call Home
Moving into a place of our own is a major life event. For a person with additional needs it can often be the first significant step on their journey to greater independence. Just what that place might look like and how it all works is the focus of this episode with Chris Hill, Head of Housing & Estates at Grace Eyre. Chris explains the different housing options that are available. He also talks about how housing preferences and the level of support needed will inevitably change over time as well as the importance of finding people the right place to call home, not just a place to live.
105 Grace Eyre Profile Series – Creating A Roadmap To Navigate The Future
The future can be scary if you really don’t know what your options are. Having a roadmap with ideas of where to start would help and what that involves is the topic of this episode with Tom Conroy, the new business manager at Grace Eyre. Tom talks about not only his role as the first point of contact and what that can mean from identifying employment opportunities to explaining housing options, but also the challenges of the role. These challenges often occur because people are unaware of their options.
Articles
A Guide To Friendship
How many friends do you have? Possibly not as many as you had before you had a child with additional needs. This is a harsh but true fact. Friends slowly disappear because they don’t understand or they’re afraid. I have both lost and gained friends because my daughter has additional needs. It’s a bit like when someone passes away some people come around others stay away because they don’t know what to say.
Start Early And Often
My ultimate objective is to get rid of my daughter. That’s not quite as bad as it sounds! My goal is to enable my youngest daughter to move out and live in a place of her own. When I have spoken on the podcast to people involved in training programs, one common theme has been that often the young people that come to them lack some of the basic daily living skills.
Why A Saturday Job Is So Valuable
What’s in a part time or Saturday job? An awful lot, I believe, if you’re a young person with additional needs. I should qualify that by acknowledging that for some young people there will be restrictions on the kind of jobs they can hold down because of the nature of their needs.
Our Focus
Young people with additional needs should have the opportunity to live independently in a way right for them. The podcast is about sharing stories and sharing solutions that enable parents and carers to support them on this path to greater independence.
Independence for most people consists of three things:
1) Having a Purpose for the day – usually paid employment, but possibly a place to go to make a contribution to the world.
2) Having the Daily Living skills for independence – being able to look after ourselves, cooking, shopping.
3) Having Relationships with family, friends and maybe even a partner one day.
There is also an additional consideration that serves as the foundation of all these – Financial Security. Like it or not money often dictates how we live our lives, and we need to confront the issue of how our children will survive financially when we are gone.
For more information visit redgiraffesolutions.com
All Episodes
104 Grace Eyre Profile – Looking Back To Move Forward
Welcome to this first episode of this Profile Series on The Grace Eyre Foundation, an organization dedicated to supporting people with additional needs to live their lives exactly how they want to. In this episode I’m talking to Jackie Reeve about the Sharing Our Voices project. This episode is about starting at the beginning, looking at the history of the organization not just from a timeline perspective but from what can be learnt from history. You will hear from Jackie how this project provided not only a better understanding of how
103 Bridging The Gap – The Role of Parents – Things we can do For and things we can do With
The Bridging The Gap series has been all about highlighting some of the organisations that are providing solutions for young people, so they have more options when they want to move from school into employment. The key is to both engage with potential employers as well as provide young people with the skills and support they need. But the role parents play in bridging the gap shouldnt be forgotten. In this solo episode I talk about what we as parents can do For and With
102 Bridging The Gap – Forward2Employment: Reimagining The Future
In this part 2 of my conversation with the team at Forward2Employment (F2E) the focus is on the role of the job coach as well as hearing from current interns and from graduates of the supported internships program. Two of the job coaches, Robert Harris and Christine Richards, talk about why their role encompasses more than just coaching the intern in the workplace but also helping them build the skills they need as they move on from this program. We hear from some of the current interns