Our Spring 2020 issue
As I have already said in my most recent blog, (https://www.cl-initiatives.co.uk/editors-blog-march-2020-one-thing-minds/) naturally at present everybody’s mind is on one thing – the Covid-19 pandemic and its huge impact on the lives of us all. I hope that all our readers and supporters are safe and well in these difficult times.
I know that many of you, either through work or your family life, are currently supporting people with learning disabilities through this unprecedented situation.
Some of you live with learning disabilities or autism yourselves, involved in self-advocacy, or peer support or other community action.
I hope we can all support each other through this difficult time as one community, and that Community Living magazine can play a small part in this.
Our next issue, in July, will contain reports from the front line of support services confronted with this pandemic, telling the inside story of how organisations and individuals have coped.
An unsung hero
Meanwhile I hope you will find some things to enjoy, to stimulate your mind, even to provide some moments of escape, in our current Spring issue. Our interview (Supporting the people on edge) is with Liz Tilly, a real unsung hero. Since the late 1980s she has been battling away in the West Midlands establishing a succession of voluntary organisations supporting and involving people with moderate or mild learning disabilities.
Her motivation has been that this group often fall between the cracks, seen as too able to need support and yet struggling to cope in society. This can result in them leading deeply isolated, ignored and poverty-stricken lives, and Liz Tilly has battled for decades (with great success) to give the people she works with the self-confidence, resources and support they need to fit in.
Is everyone included?
At the other end of the learning disability spectrum we continue our debate over whether people with profound and multiple learning disabilities are genuinely included under the learning disability umbrella. Clare Palmer and Virginia Bovell (How inclusive is the learning disability community) talk about their parental experience of feeling marginalised within the learning disability community and how ‘universal’ ideas about learning disability seem not to take their profoundly disabled family members into account.
Try to imagine a life without rights
In this issue a number of our contributors grapple with questions concerning rights.
Are declarations of rights meaningful, or just wish lists with no means of enforcement? (The trouble with rights in reality) Are rights enough, or do we need something beyond them, a certain type of community to enable people to live their rights meaningfully? (Language of rights needs revisiting) Do universal rights genuinely apply to everyone, or do they sometimes exclude some in the way they are structured? (How inclusive is the learning disability community)
We air these questions in a spirit of enquiry and open debate, and to encourage a thoughtful understanding and appraisal of rights to ensure that they have an actual impact on the lives of people with learning disabilities.
However, to ask such questions is not to deny the need for rights. We should all take great heed of the article by Sally Warren and Jo Giles (Act together, uphold human rights), where they write about a simple exercise they carry out in their training for support staff. How does it feel, they ask participants, as we remove, one by one, the rights that you say you value most in your everyday lives?
As people imagine not being able to choose who they live with, who comes into their home, whether to refuse medical treatment, they realise how essential such basic rights are to their daily lives. Our shock should not be at how much we take these basic rights for granted, but how a section of the population are so often denied rights the rest of us would not be prepared to live without.
Enjoy this issue, and stay safe and well!
