Families who care for a child or adult with severe learning disabilities and challenging behaviour can often feel isolated and because severe challenging behaviour is not common; they may feel that they are the only family experiencing such difficulties.
They are often unaware that there are ways that they can manage challenging behaviour that mean the whole family can enjoy a better quality of life both in the home and enabling them to access community facilities.
The CBF has a vast range of resources and runs training courses for families, but we would like to help more families access these. We also have in place a support line and an email network; which are available in office hours, but we would like to improve our use of social media to help families access mutual support 24 hours a day.
Alongside social media we'd like to train an additional 15 family carer volunteers to support other families nationally; which has been a successful model for us.
By increasing the users on our Facebook and Twitter sites and the quality of information on the pages we will be able to provide a bank of information that can be accessed by new families in the future 24 hours a day.
Not all families will choose to use social media as a way of communicating, but this will be an additional form of communicating for the time being and we will retain existing communication channels.
The families we recruit as volunteers will have a severely disabled family member and sometimes they themselves will be in crisis; therefore they may not always be available to support others. CBF staff members step in to support both families when this happens.
We can provide a quarterly report which will report against the activities and where appropriate will give numbers and short case studies to show the impact of the project.
We are a national charity based in Chatham in Kent. This is largely a virtual project that will cover England, Scotland and Wales. Training for volunteers may be arranged in a different location for their convenience.
Children and adults with severe learning disabilities who have challenging behaviour will be the key beneficiaries because their families and professionals involved in their care will be able to access more information and training around managing challenging behaviour and supporting them to access community facilities that they might not previously have accessed.
Our charity was founded by a family carer who has a son with severe learning disabilities and challenging behaviour. Family experience is at the core of all our activities and when families receive our support we are often told of the relief they feel in sharing their concerns with someone who understands their situation.
We have built up a strong reputation in our field and work closely with other charities and organisations to ensure there is no duplication of work.
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