Gerraint’s blog January 2021

A busier month this month! The Engage to Change Women in Work event on 21 January went well and one of our ambassadors Elsa spoke at the event along with an All Wales People First employee Lucy Hinksman.  We had good publicity and some great feedback. I hope we’ve been able to encourage more young women to join the project as currently females are under-represented.

Part of my role as Lead Ambassador is to network with other organisations. I was asked to speak at the Supported Loving event on Zoom in January with Sian Davies from Mencap. At the conference we talked about the difficulties that people with learning disabilities face, not least when they are ‘coming out’ as LGBT. I did a presentation around the stigma of ‘coming out’ and we had positive feedback from it.

The National Autism Team have also asked me to continue to work closely with them going forwards, even though my role on their working group to re-design the website has now finished.

I’ve been catching up individually with each of the ambassadors via Zoom this month and working with my line manager to plan refresher training days for each of them around the Engage to Change presentations that they give to anyone interested in being part of the project.

The Project Evaluation Forum took place as part of my Fun Hour on the 15 January.