Living in a community isn’t the same as being part of that community. How can Sense make it easier for deafblind people with learning difficulties to decide how they would like to experience their local area? In Thanet, Kent, the Community Access Project set out to do just that – a year on, how is it doing? Sarah Butler went along to investigate and Mike Pinches took the photos.

Selina Hill is 26. She has the biggest grin and the dirtiest laugh you’ve ever met and a totally infectious enthusiasm. When I arrive at her house she’s busy upstairs having her hair straightened, just behind me is Mike, the photographer, and Selina is determined to look good for the camera. When she comes downstairs she looks great and she knows it. She’s certainly not shy and as soon as we’re introduced she starts talking, in a mix of speech and sign.

Most of all, Selina wants to show me her clothes: she’s enormously proud of her uniform, complete with her own staff name badge. Until a year ago, her dream of working in the clothes department of a superstore was just that, a dream. Now though, she’s a regular member of the team at the vast Tesco Extra on the edge of Margate and her working days – Tuesdays and Fridays are the highlight of her week.

In the car on the way to Tesco, Selina is quiet but as soon as we arrive she rushes off into the store, Mike, Jonathan her support worker and me trailing in her wake. We soon realise that everyone knows Selina: her cheerful personality and readiness to communicate mean that wherever she goes people greet her with a smile and a hello. Selina returns their greetings but has no time to stop – as soon as we’re signed in she makes a beeline for the lifts to the second floor.

Selina is unfazed by the vastness of the store – off she goes, straight to the store room at the back, to find out what her task is for the day. There’s quite a variety – she could be tagging new stock, putting clothes away from the changing rooms, counting stock, or showing people to changing cubicles. Today, she’s sorting out new bras and pants.

It’s a job she’s done before so she gets straight to work, pushing a trolley piled with crates of stock out onto the shop floor, heading for the lingerie department. She makes a detour to the tills to collect plastic bags – stopping to chat to her colleagues working there and then gets to work, taking the bras and pants out of their individual plastic wrappings and racking them, bras on the top rail and pants below.

Every so often someone comes up to say hello to Selina, they use a mix of speech and sign, with Jonathan helping to interpret. The staff are clearly fond of her, and enjoy working with her. One colleague, Linda, tells me that they have a laugh sometimes, her and Selina ‘because Jonathan talks all the time so I go past and mime “chatterbox” to Selina’ and we both laugh at him’. Selina’s in on the joke, she’s part of the team and it’s clear that it makes her very happy.

Linda and some of the other staff do sometimes find it hard to communicate with Selina, whose speech isn’t always clear, they admit that it would be hard to work with her without Jonathan’s support with communication. But Selina’s working on her speech, and getting better all the time – and Tesco has set up sign language courses for its staff which are hugely over-subscribed.

So how did Selina get here? A year ago she was finishing college – like many of her peers she had done every course that was available to her, and there was nothing left for her to do. Despite her outgoing nature and the best efforts of staff, she was largely limited to activities involving the small circle of people living in Sense homes in Thanet.

Mark Horton, area manager, picks up the story: ‘I wanted people living with Sense to get a better idea of the community they live in – and also to expand Sense’s presence in the community.’ So he asked Karen Hollow and Elaine Turner both deputy managers of Sense homes, to set up a Community Access Project (CAP), looking at ways of opening up real interaction with the community. They would focus on three areas: education, work and leisure.

They didn’t have any funding at first, so they each used four hours of their existing week on the project. They soon realised that four hours wasn’t enough so now they each spend eight hours a week on CAP.

Back at the beginning, the first question that Elaine and Karen asked themselves was what the people they supported needed and wanted. They created a questionnaire for each person to fill in, helped by staff if necessary.

To Elaine and Karen’s surprise – Selina had always said that she didn’t know when asked before what she would like to do, she put down that she would like to work in the clothing department of a large store. They approached Tesco and today not only Selina but also two others have work placements there.

Paul Iley didn’t need to fill in his form to tell them that his greatest desire was to work in KFC, his staff team had been trying to arrange a placement for ages, with no success. The CAP team was determined to have a go, though, so instead of talking to Paul’s local KFC they went to the top and contacted KFC headquarters. It took many calls and much patience, but eventually they got through to the right person, and the placement was Paul’s.

CAP is about more than work placements, though. First and foremost it’s about involving the deafblind people in the planning, decision-making and execution of their programme. Says Mark Horton, ‘One of the perils with care is that it’s often done to people rather than with them, we need to empower them to think for themselves.’

So the team decided to ask a resident from each of Thanet’s three homes to join the CAP team: Selina, Paul Todd and Paul Iley all agreed. On the day that we visited, the CAP team was meeting: Mark, Elaine and Karen met first, then Selina, Paul and Paul joined them, with staff to facilitate their communication. The agenda was to review last year’s activities and to decide what to do next – more work placements, a big party and regular discos, and a new link with a college to offer cooking classes. Mark chaired the meeting, taking the three representatives through the agenda carefully: ‘It’s a challenge to pitch the meeting at the right level so that they feel involved and not patronised. They hadn’t been to meetings before but they’ve got more used to them now and they’re all much more involved as the meetings have gone on.’

This perfectly illustrates the underlying approach of the Community Access Project. As Mark says, ‘You and I are the people we are because of the experiences we’ve had and the people we’ve met. Without them we’d be shallower, less able to express ourselves and far more dependent on other people. It’s our job to help people to have experiences and to help them to interpret them.'

Elaine comments that the representatives love the meetings and are very aware of their importance: ‘They tell their families about the meetings with great pride.’ How much do the residents on the CAP team actually contribute, though? In the meeting we attended they all came up with a wide range of ideas for activities that people might like to take part in. Each then accepted responsibility for following up one activity.

I later asked Elaine how much of the follow-up work Paul, Paul and Selina did themselves. She described how keen Paul Todd is to help find work placements for other people. He’s excited by the project and comes up with ideas that he wouldn’t have in the past, before CAP he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to think about other people. She says that all of them are catching up on years of not being involved. Paul is very capable – when asked to look into setting up a badminton class, he chose the leisure centres he wanted to assess, and only needed a staff member to go along with him to interpret.

Not only is this liberating for Paul but it also demonstrates to the wider community the value of talking directly to people with communication and learning difficulties. Not every organisation is as approachable as Tesco or KFC: the CAP team is working hard to spread the word about inclusion.

Selina will be helping to arrange CAP’s next disco. She doesn’t have a concept of cost, so that’s down to Elaine and Karen, but she’ll check potential venues with them, help choose decorations, make posters, deliver tickets and set up the venue on the day. Their first disco attracted 60 people with learning disabilities from the area and they hope to have more next time. It’s a great way for people to meet each other, and maybe to make new friends.

Mark Horton has recently begun a new CAP project in Barnet, where the service users’ needs are generally more complex than those in Thanet. Here too they are fully involved in the project. For example, one young man tried travelling on a public bus for the first time, and reported back to the meeting on the challenges he met – challenges many other service users would share. Mark feels strongly that however complex someone’s needs, they still have a right to try out new experiences and to have their responses heard.

What difference has CAP made to the people involved in Thanet? Elaine has seen huge changes in the people they support as they’ve developed new skills and awareness. For example Selina’s speech is much clearer – because at home she can communicate by sign, she didn’t use speech much before, but now she knows that the staff at Tesco can’t sign she’s trying hard to improve it. Elaine’s enthuses too about the more general changes she has seen in all of the people affected by CAP: ‘Their pride and their personalities have come out more. They all seem really happy, excited and want to be involved.’

Mark Horton has seen the benefits to staff too: Karen and Elaine’s new roles have given them the chance to learn and to diversify, which not only helps their careers but also the development of Sense’s services. Elaine loves it: ‘It’s so rewarding, I can never wait for the next week!’

At the moment the Community Access Project covers only Sense’s homes in Thanet and Barnet. Mark is sure, though, that there’s plenty of scope for similar projects across the country so if you would like to talk about the practicalities of setting up your own project, contact Mark at mark.horton@sense.org.uk.

© Sarah Butler 2009