Chartering for Involvement!

My name is Ben and I live at Milltown Community in Aberdeenshire. I like getting involved in campaigns and meetings to give those with intellectual disabilities a voice. At my community we have Inclusive Meetings which are meetings where the tenants can speak out about things which are important to them or the community.

About The Charter for Involvement

In early 2018 I went to a Keys To Life Refresher meeting in Inverurie. At the meeting I found out a little bit about something called The Charter for Involvement and was really interested.

The Charter for Involvement was written by the National Involvement Network under ARC Scotland. The Charter has 12 statements that say how people who use support services want to be involved, treated and respected.

Lots of organisations have already signed up to the Charter to say they would make involvement better for the people they support. I wanted to do that at Milltown so I told co-worker, Kirsty, about it and asked if she could arrange an Inclusive Meeting to see if our community liked the idea of signing up also.

Milltown says Yes!

Kirsty and I worked together to make a power point presentation to explain the Charter in an easy way to all the tenants and workers at Milltown community. At the end of each meeting I asked who wanted to join. Everyone agreed and said ‘yes’!

We then wrote up an Action Plan to detail what we were going to do to improve certain things in line with the 12 statements. We also wrote down the things we were already doing well at. At Milltown’s community council meeting in August I presented The Charter once more to get their go ahead to officially sign up. They were very impressed and agreed with all of The Charter’s principles. David Nicoll, the chairman signed the Charter for Involvement Certificate which Kirsty sent to ARC Scotland along with the action plan.

ARC Scotland’s response said we are now officially signed up and told us that we are the 70^th organisation to do so. I am very pleased that we have signed up and hope to complete our action plan by next year!

This blog is Ben’s personal view; it was written with support from co-worker Kirsty Baxter, and does not necessarily represent the views of Camphill Scotland.