My Experiences

Central England People FirstOur History Project

• We wrote about the history of Central England People First.

• I was the project manager on our history project.

• We ran our project but we needed to make sure we included people who had the skills we needed.

• It was hard to work out what was important – especially from the paperwork. There was so much!

• We talked to experts at Northamptonshire archives to help us decide what to keep and what to throw.

• We had a traffic light system. This is on our website.

• We had so much information it was a challenge to make it accessible.

• We had help from Helen Graham to think about the topics that were most important.

• We wrote down all the things People First meant to us and all the things we did.

• We sorted these into piles.

• When it came to thinking about what to include in our booklet this was much harder.

• We had to make tough decisions like thinking about ‘who it was for’.

• We decided that the booklet was for funders and professionals and other people first groups.

• We decided not to write it in easy read so we could fit more information in. This was a hard decision.

• We also had to decide what was important to write in the booklet.

• It was hard to get the balance right between what was important to us as individuals and what was important to People First.

• Some of our support workers did not agree with our choices. They thought that we had forgotten important things.

• But we felt strongly that it was our booklet.

• We wanted people to understand how important Central England People First was to the whole world.

• This is called ‘historical context’ this was really hard for us to do but we knew it was very important.

• We asked our friend Professor Jan Walmsley to help write one half of the booklet.

Our problems were:• Deciding what was

important.• Choosing who we needed

to read our work.• Deciding whose story we

wanted to tell.• Trying to compare what we

had done to other things that were happening and say why they were important.

Our Advice is:• Ask for help. This means

knowing what you are an expert at and knowing what you are not an expert at.

• You will have to make hard decisions but choose what feels right.

• Make sure the voice of people with learning disabilities does not get lost.

I have lots to say about my work with the National Forum of People with Learning

Disabilities too.

Please come and ask me in the break.