Positive Carrickfergus, Carrickfergus and District Mencap Society and The Royal Mencap Society are working together to build on the Royal Mencap Society's ‘My Community’ pilot that was successfully brought into Carrickfergus by Positive Carrickfergus and Carrickfergus Junior Gateway.
The pilot, which aimed to ‘help make Carrickfergus an even better place for people with learning disabilities to live happy, healthy lives’, has been running in Carrickfergus since November 2021 and the current phase will end June 2024.
The pilot, which aimed to ‘help make Carrickfergus an even better place for people with learning disabilities to live happy, healthy lives’, has been running in Carrickfergus since November 2021 and the current phase will end June 2024.
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NewsTranscript
00:00This is my community.
00:08My name is Lou Mackenzie and I'm the community partner for the Mencap My Community pilot in Carrick,
00:14Fergus. What we've really noticed as a result of My Community are the existing organisations
00:18coming together and working outside of their own sectors, starting to share resources,
00:23refer each other to each other's group. Part of the work that we've been doing in Carrick is to
00:27seed fund ideas. So one of the things has been the garden up at Carrick Manor and that's been
00:32a group of people come together from different sectors again to work together and establish a
00:36garden where the community can gather and Chris, one of our connectors, has been really involved
00:40in that garden since the start. My name is Chris White. I'm a community connector through Mencap.
00:45This is in Carrick Manor, in Carrick, Fergus it is. It's for the residents that are older people
00:51come and come out and do some gardening projects. Raised beds are raised up the way for so the
00:56wheelchair people can come in. Somebody said George played the guitar, we've got him a guitar and we
01:01had a wee sing song in here. There's a day centre called The Base which is funded by the Northern
01:08Health Trust. Sadly they lost one of their members last year due to heart problems and David, one of
01:13our connectors, thought maybe Defibrillator would be a lovely tribute to him. It's been put on site,
01:18it's been paid for by our seed funding. People with learning disability who live and work there
01:21have been trained in using the defibrillator as well so it's not just a piece of equipment that
01:26hopefully is never used but people have been given skills and confidence they know what to
01:29do in that situation should it sadly happen again. The best thing that has happened in Carrick,
01:34the defib arriving here on site so that'll save lives hopefully.
01:41We did an informal audit of the time because we thought what's good about our time and one
01:46of the connectors David noticed that there were lots of steps into the shops. 40% of the town
01:50centre shops had some type of accessibility issue so we came up with a campaign called Ring for Ramp
01:56so out of those 40% of the town centre shops that have access issues we've supplied 50% of those.
02:03What we've really noticed as a result of my community are the sort of existing
02:07organisations coming together. This is Carrick Fergus and this is my community.