Our Empowerment Through Self-Advocacy event on Friday 13th June saw around 60 people attend, coming from a wide range of organisations and backgrounds. At the event, we heard inspiring stories about how taking an advocacy and self-advocacy approach can make positive differences to people’s lives.

We had guest speakers from Leeds Refugee Forum, TransLeeds, MEMEC and Lippy People. They all spoke about how grants they were awarded from the Advocacy Development Fund helped their work in developing self-advocacy work with the communities they support.

Later, we held some well-attended workshops on how to use self-advocacy, including some translated and Easy Read versions of our self-advocacy pack.

Download speakers’ slides

We have slides available to download from talks delivered at the event. To get them, please click on the buttons below:

In addition to slides, Leeds Refugee Forum also have a video about some of their advocacy work. You can see it by clicking on the button below.

Meanwhile, Lippy People have a range of videos made for their Life, Loss, Learning, Legacy work on their YouTube channel. To see that, please click on the button below.

Self-advocacy resources

In one of the workshops, we shared our Self-Advocacy Pack. This is available for download from our Self-Advocacy Resources page. Different formats of the pack were shared to get participants’ feedback.

For another workshop, we shared examples of some of Autism AIM’s self-advocacy tools. They included their Mental Health Guides, their GP Appointment Planner and the Autism Health Passport that they coproduced alongside local NHS services and Leeds Mind.

In the workshop around empowering people with learning disabilities, examples of some resources made by our CHANGE team were used. All of them were in Easy Read format.

What happens next?

We will soon be publishing different versions of some of our self-advocacy tools. They include an Easy Read version. There will also be translated copies of the tools, written in the following languages:

  • Arabic
  • Polish
  • Tigrinya
  • Urdu

All the translated resources have been worked on by Leeds Refugee Forum. Keep up to date by following us on our social media accounts!

We will also be publishing a photo album with snaps of the event. The photos were taken by Simon from Addictive Media – massive thanks to him for coming along to capture what happened.

Huge thanks to everyone who came to the event. Thanks to all the speakers – Donna from Leeds Refugee Forum, Shiv from TransLeeds, Sabah from MEMEC and Peter from Lippy People. Finally, thanks go to the St George’s Conference Centre for being so helpful and accommodating in hosting us.