What makes a community where we all belong?
Last week, more than 50 people came to our first community conversation to explore the Social Care Future Vision for Wokingham Borough. We met in the Bradbury Centre on Rose Street in Wokingham, where people broke out into small groups to share their experience, opinions and ideas over a cup of tea and cake.
Some of the things the groups talked about were how it can be hard to find out about groups if you don’t use the internet, the opportunity to help people share skills with each other and lack of accessible changing spaces in town. The chat also shone a light on some great groups and businesses that are welcoming and inclusive.
We are going to continue to talk about communities where we all belong with groups and people, because this is the start of a piece of collaborative work to create a plan that will bring the Social Care Future to life in Wokingham Borough.
Share your opinions on ‘Living in a place you call home’
Our next session will be thinking about another one of the key changes in our charter - everybody lives in a place they call home. We will be asking what helps people live in a place they call home and what gets in the way. If you would like to be a part of this conversation from 11.30am to 1pm on Monday 13 May, email us and we will send you an invitation with more details.
Working Together for Change: Putting it into practice
This week, a group of people involved in our local Social Care Future movement attended training in how to run co-production sessions, using the ‘Working Together for Change’ approach.
Working Together for Change is a process for collaborating on community challenges, and ensuring everyone has an equal voice. It starts from hundreds of pieces of data that you collect from lots of different stakeholders – people who use services, people who commission (or buy) services and people who provide services. You then work together as a group to uncover the root cause of the issues and generate solutions – by the end of the two days you have an action plan for change.
Yvonne, a resident with lived experience of adult social care, was one of the Wokingham group to be trained. She said: "The training has given me great insight into the process and I would say to fellow service users this is going to be a great opportunity to share our experience of the good and bad and see some positive changes happen."
She and eight other people will be putting the training into practice next month on the project we are running to improve direct payments.
If your group is interested in learning more about the Working Together for Change approach, or you would like to be a part of the direct payment project, please send us an email.
Getting ready to vote at the elections this May
Local elections are taking place on Thursday 2 May, along with the election of the Police and Crime Commissioner for the Thames Valley.
All 54 borough council seats are up for election and, wherever you live in the borough, you will have the opportunity to vote and help choose your local councillors. We may also have some parish council elections too, but we won’t know which ones until closer to the election date.
If you are registered to vote (whether you vote in person, by post or via a proxy), you will receive a poll card telling you which elections are taking place and where/how you can vote. You can check if you are registered to vote by contacting our electoral services team.
If you are not registered, you can do this online at: www.gov.uk/register-to-vote. It only takes five minutes and you will need to provide your date of birth and national insurance number.
Useful resources
We want to make it easy for people to vote, so thought we’d share some useful resources to help you understand what you need to do to be prepared.
The organisation My Vote My Voice has produced a quick guide to voting. This guide gives instructions that are easy to read and understand on everything about voting, including how to vote, deciding how you want to vote and applying for voter ID.
The Electoral Commission also provides a range of downloadable resources in accessible formats to help people understand the voting process. This includes animations, audio files, braille files, and guides in BSL, easy read and plain text formats.
 And finally...
Last month, the national Social Care Future movement created a video about our work to create a local Social Care Future charter and our success getting the council to give cross party support for it.
Wokingham Borough Council is the first authority to formally adopt the vision and commit to the five key changes to make the vision a reality. You can read more on the Social Care Future website and watch the video.
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