One of the meetings at the Queer Circle : celebrating Eid with the BSL interpreter
For the past year, we have been having our meetings at the Queer Circle, Greenwich Peninsula. We are very grateful to them for hosting us so kindly and warmly. We celebrated each others festivals – for some of us, we do not have family here to celebrate those holidays with us. We were funded by the Community Knowledge Fund, Young Foundation. Much gratitude to them for the learning experience to too. And to David Hockham from Greenwich University who accompanied us on the learning journey.
We exchanged stories and we also started on a piece of art work which will express our identities and impairments. We listened to each other – with some differences of opinion.
We look forward to finishing the piece of work that we co produced and are proud of. We are looking for a public space to display it! Its exciting.
Group members working together on the piece of work, assembling what we started with individual canvases.
The aim of the Greenwich Disabled People’s Innovation Project (GDPIP) was to built a group of deaf and disabled people in the area where we can meet ‘out of the isolation’ of the pandemic.
We made an effort to connect with different disabled people and organisations – some of whom responded and joined our workshops. but we knew the funding would run out and we would like to sustain the momentum.
We were lucky enough to secure some funding from the Young Foundation and the Queer Circle at the Design District were kind enough to provide us with a venue.
Follow us here to know how we are getting on, we will be giving more details soon!
Access and Barriers Explore what good access means to you. How accessible are services and places near where you live? How could access be improved?
Cooking for wellbeing How to make a variety of easy and delicious meals with or without support. Compile a ‘cookbook’ of meals that are healthy, affordable and easy to prepare.
Make your experiences count Share good and bad experiences. What could have been done differently? Create a resource to promote ‘good practice’.
Accessible workshops will be held at The Bathway Theatre, SE18 6QX, with sessions being recorded for sharing online.
Greenwich Disabled People’s Innovation Project – a new project to increase disabled people’s influence, design resources and improve wellbeing.
Over the next 10
months, the Greenwich Disabled People’s Innovation Project will work with local
disabled people in a series of FREE workshops and mini-projects to improve
wellbeing by:
Building new friendships and re-building connections lost during the pandemic,
Sharing good / bad experiences and suggesting solutions,
Learning new skills and developing projects using these skills,
Identifying resources already available and designing new resources,
Becoming expert representatives to influence matters important to local disabled people and their communities.
“I am excited about the project and how engagement in the workshops can be an empowerment experience and a tool for change in the community“
Anahita Harding, Culture Access co director
Workshops will be
designed and run by local disabled people, for local disabled people and their supporters and will cover:
“Looking forward to being part of a co-creation process to find solutions to problems that matter #OpenThirdSpace“
David Hockham, Theatre Manager of the University of Greenwich’s Bathway Theatre
Access in your area – good / bad examples and how to improve access.
Making nutritious meals with or without support.
Sharing your experiences to influence change.
“We are delighted to take part in this project to increase Disabled People’s wellbeing by building stronger networks to raise awareness, increase influence and ensure that Disabled Voices are heard.”
Jenny Hurst, Greenwich DPAC co founder
British Sign Language (BSL) interpretation and Personal Assistance (PA) support will be available (if required) during workshops.
The face-to-face
workshops will also be made available to view online.
To register your interest and/or to receive information about the Greenwich Disabled People’s Innovation Project, please complete our online form
This project is funded by the Royal Borough of Greenwich.
We don’t always get to see each other that often, but I enjoy that we keep in touch on social media. We have a shared love of animals, trees, making things, social justice, and of course vegan cooking.
slivers of darl chocolate on a wooden chopping board with a green knife
We’ve only got one planet, and we need to take better care
of it. Very often, this also means taking better care of ourselves and each
other too. Pollution, climate change, deforestation are human rights issues as
well as environmental issues. The impacts of what we do have the power to
create change, and it’s by sharing ideas and getting excited about them that we
can learn to do better.
I will be attempting your moussaka recipe soon, with the
appropriate number of cloves (not bulbs) of garlic. Your knitted mice will be
watching to make sure I do it right.
This is what I’m making the next time you come down, whether
by car or by boat.
Ingredients:
210g coconut cream
180g smooth peanut butter
20g icing sugar
20g golden syrup
25g dark chocolate
Method: Put a tin of coconut milk in the fridge upside down
the night before you want to make this. This will separate it into a little
coconut water and the coconut equivalent of clotted cream.
Scoop the top half of the tin of coconut milk into a bowl. Try
not to eat it before it gets there. Save the other half of the tin to use in
hot chocolate.
Add the peanut butter, icing sugar and golden syrup to the
bowl.
Whisk until fluffy or the mixer (human or electric) starts to make noises. Pause, then whisk some more.
whisked cream on mixer
Spoon into serving dishes. Charity shops, when reopened, are
a good place to hunt for pretty ones that cost about 20p.
Chop the chocolate into shards and sprinkle on the top. Put in the fridge to set slightly, or eat immediately.
creamy pudding decorated with slivers of chocolate in a sundae dish
Fleur enjoys experimenting with new recipes and cooking old favourites. Always assisted by someone who can take care of the chopping, lifting, and mixing, Fleur’s role in the kitchen is to create new flavour combinations, find ways of changing recipes to include what she has in the house or to work around her intolerances, and to lick the bowl.
We finally wrapped up on the last of our interview videos about the intercession of being Black and Disabled in our #BlackDisabledLivesMatter for Black History Project, funded by the Royal Borough of Greenwich.
We at Culture Access are very proud to host this webinar on the 5th October to celebrate Black History Month. This is a celebration as well as a discussion on the intersection of being Black and Disabled and other identities. We welcome everybody to join us at this webinar which will have BSL and captions.
Joanna is an award-winning, agenda-setting Diversity champion and recruiter, social campaigner, TV executive, broadcaster and journalist. As a campaigner for diversity within the publishing, TV, Radio, Digital and Creative Industries, Joanna is regularly at the centre of the diversity agenda, leading conversations around inclusion and representation.
Julie is a Black Disabled activist who advocates for racial and disability equality. She‘s been campaigning for the Black disabled community for more than three decades by setting organisations, crowdfunding, and advising the government on how to better support this demographic. Jaye Charles’s success as an activist is shown through the multiple awards she has won from Lifetime achievement award, Excellence in Diversity to the Royal Association of Disabled People. One of the organisations that Julie Jaye Charles has set up, The Equalities National Council (ENC), is the only charity which is Black and minority ethnic user-led disabled peoples organisation in the UK. The organisation is also renowned for primarily focusing on delivering expert advocacy and mentoring support on behalf of BME disabled people and their carers.
Viv Cameron
Viv is a retired barrister and former training and development officer on the executive Committee of the National Black Crown Prosecution Association. Due to chronic pain issues she identifies as disabled. As a black feminist, she is currently is active in the voluntary sector as Chair of the South East London Wool and Textile Festival. (SELWAT) and CraftA, a community arts group working to make creativity a right for everyone. She abhors hypocrisy in public life and is interested in social and creative egalitarianism, political intersectionality, charity and social enterprise compliance. She is a keen brainstormer and sometime textile artist.
Yannick Nyah
Yannick is a Founding Board Member and Director at BME VOLUNTEERS CIC, a service and goal-oriented person, with 17 years background in physical, emotional and psychological well-being best and bad practices. Yannick’s core competencies include quantitative and qualitative analysis, active listening, some complex problem solving, community outreach and engagement work, excellent communication and time-management skills.
The role requires handling multiple stakeholder, staff and client work with, accuracy and efficiency. Suffering with mental health challenges, somewhere on the spectrum and a recovering alcoholic. In 2017, he had a bicycle accident which left him needing a major knee operation and disabled. This is what has lead to his career choice today.
Maya Meikle
I am 22 years old and I have a disability. I was born with Hemiplegia, a form of Cerebral Palsy, as well as my twin sister. I am outspoken when you get to know me but, sometimes very quiet. My disability has affected me in so many ways, emotionally and physically. I am very conscious about how I look, and what people think of me. I do not like to be in the spotlights. My disability affects the right side of my body which causes a weakness in my movement. I was 3 months premature with my twin sister. I am very petite in size and weight due to my disability. As I grew older, I learnt how to accept my disability a little bit more, but I am still working to fully accept that ‘its ok to be different. As part of my degree studying Digital Film Production, I made a mini documentary about disability. For this project I wanted to create a platform where young black women who have a disability can tell their stories about what it is like living with a disability and how it impacts their day to day life. What barriers they come across and how they deal with it.
Fleur Perry joins us in adding her own favourite recipe. We look forward to having more favourites from her.
— This year has been unkind to everyone, and many people have responded with kindness.
Everyone’s locked down, some of us are even still
shielding, and the only way any of us are getting through this is by supporting
each other. I’ve started thinking of this as Mutually Assured Survival.
There’s been a lot of people who have spotted when I’ve
floundered, and sent me exactly what was needed at exactly the right moment. At
least half of these people happen to fly the rainbow flag, and so I’ve chosen
to make Pride cookies as a way of saying thank you. I won’t embarrass you by
saying who you are, but you know.
I made them originally during Pride Month, but you can
eat solidarity cookies at any time of year. There’s no rules. Just crunchy
chocolaty goodness.
Cookies won’t solve the problem of some LGBTQ+ disabled
people being locked down with and relying on unsupportive family or care staff.
I know people in this situation, and the pandemic has made it much harder, if
not impossible, to live independently for the first time, or change care
provider, or hire new PAs.
Cookies will not change the fact that when travel becomes
safer, there are still some places where some of my friends won’t be safe.
There are some destinations which will never get my money, until everyone else
can go there too.
Cookies can’t remove accessibility barriers to events,
meaning that even when people can be together again, some will still be left
out. Ramps and accessible toilets and quieter spaces and video subtitles and so
on are all well-established ideas; exclusion is unnecessary.
Fleur enjoys experimenting with new recipes and cooking old favourites. Always assisted by someone who can take care of the chopping, lifting, and mixing, Fleur’s role in the kitchen is to create new flavour combinations, find ways of changing recipes to include what she has in the house or to work around her intolerances, and to lick the bowl.
