Welcome to the 6th and final edition of the Em.bold.en newsletter. The Embolden project was started in 2017 to give a stronger voice to older families who have relatives with learning disabilities to influence decision makers, hold them to account and improve services. We are just about to complete the final year of the Comic Relief three-year funded project although OxFSN will continue to support and raise the profile of older family carers in everything they do.
Read the Newsletter here:
This course is for family carers of children or adults with learning disabilities and is OCN (Open College Network) accredited.
We are particularly looking for people who want to use their lived experience as a family carers to develop further skills in order to support other families (ideally working with us at OXFSN).
We also welcome people who want to do the course for their own (and their family members’) benefit.
To read more about this course and for information about the course dates see the Creating Family Champions Course dates for 2019:
OxFSN’s Better Together event was held on the 8th of November 2018 at the Kassam Stadium in Oxford and attended by 117 people.
53 professionals from Health, Social Care, Education and the voluntary sector attended along with 60 family carers of children or adults with learning disabilities and/or autism and seven people with learning disabilities and their supporters.
Follow the links to read reports:
Better Together Event Report and accompanying Better Together Event ‘You Said : We Did’ Feedback Report
A brief introduction to the Social Security Benefits available to young disabled people aged 16/18 and their carers.
Click on the image below to read more.
This information leaflet is provided for guidance purposes only by www.benefitboat.com – correct at April 2019.
For specialist advice based on individual circumstances organisations that may help include:
Contact – For families with disabled children
Few of us will not at some point in our life take on the role of carer for a family member. For the majority of us it is usually an elderly parent or a spouse.
There is, however, a group of people whose caring role often goes unnoticed. Who fall under our radar as not only are they silently getting on with their caring role, and have done so for all of their life, but unless we know someone in a similar situation – we often are not aware that they even exist.
These are the Family Carers whose child is born with a learning disability and who, as a result, spend their life battling, fighting, negotiating and supporting their son or daughter to lead as normal life as possible.
Through the OxFSN Embolden Project, funded by Comic Relief, we work with older family carers to give this seldom heard group of people a collective voice in order to influence and hold decision makers to account.
Equally important is the need to highlight those individual family carers, some of whom are in their 70’s, 80’s and even 90’s, who are still supporting their family member, some who are still living at home and some who are living out of county.
This small exhibition aims to give each family carer or carers their own unique voice but also to show that whatever the circumstances of their family member, the family carer cannot step back and ‘retire’. Each story gives an insight in to the range of support and involvement they have given and continue to do so.
We would like to thank each of these family carers for allowing us to share their own individual and personal stories. They reflect the range of emotions that comes with raising a child with a learning disability – the hopes, the fears, the uncertainty and best of all the joy and laughter that each and everyone brings.
To us they are the unsung heroes who have fought to ensure that their ‘child’ is given the same recognition that we want for any of our children but have unselfishly dedicated all their life to doing so.
With special thanks to Sara Ryan for providing the photographs of our family carers.
The photographs and carers’ Life Long Caring stories are currently on display at Oxfordshire County Council County Hall during the month of June 2019.
For further information contact Kathy Liddell, em·bold·en Project Administrator.
