Care organisation 'Blown Away' by impact of Multimedia Advocacy!
On 24th September 2009 eight people with learning disabilities and eight support workers from RCHL, a leading housing and community care organisation in Essex and London, graduated from the Rix Centre’s Multimedia Advocacy training course at an event held in Whitham, Essex. The graduation event was a celebration and showcase of everything that the graduates had learnt over the course a twelve week Multimedia Advocacy training course at the Rix Centre. During the course each service user produced a multimedia Person Centred Plan (PCP) using sound, digital photography, video and text, and in the process discovered entirely new ways to listen, communicate and engage with each other. The PCPs were projected on a large screen at the graduation event as part of the presentation ceremony where the graduates were presented with their certificates.
Speaking on the day Paul Allen, Chief Executive of RCHL, talked about the impact of the Multimedia Advocacy project on his staff: ’It’s just been blowing staff away. They’re seeing things they’ve never seen before, they’re identifying ways of communicating with people, finding out things about their life experiences.....it’s fantastic that this procedure, this process, this project has enabled that to happen.’
Summing up the project Paul Allen concluded ‘I feel that we’ve got a moral commitment to make this available to all the service users in RCHL, not just in Essex’ ‘so that is the challenge for us.’
