Where have we got to with our plans to set up the community home? At present we work with three ‘full-timers’ on many things, so we have got full agendas and long job lists.
To give you some idea, we are: making small adjustments to the home before moving in; employing a carpenter to make interlocking tables and chairs; recruiting people who would like to work in the community home; working on contracts that are in line with the legal requirements; making initial contact with potential residents of our home and their families, using the approach of gradually getting to know each other better.
Pioneering work
As we do so many things all at the same time, not everything gets done in the most efficient manner. Someone wrote to me that our work is pioneering work, and that’s how it is. For every decision that we take there are more consequences than we had anticipated, which means we have to think again. We have come to accept that not everything always gets done ‘quickly and well’ as this is a fairly rare combination in the context here!
Activities club
Regarding the activities club, the registration has started. We have finished the recruitment procedure for the leader of the club and are happy with the selected candidate, Eva. In the next newsletter we hope to include an interview with her in which she will introduce herself.
We also have made the first contacts in our neighbourhood in our programme to visit families where a member of the family is intellectually disabled, and to find out about their needs, and possibly identify members for our club. The more we reach out, the more we get to know the neighbourhood and the neighbourhood gets to know us, and hopefully they will know where to find us when they need support.
Eva has a fair amount of work experience, but still will need support in the start-up phase, especially because we do not simply want to offer activities for the sake of entertaining the participants,but want to focus on developing whatever potential the participants have.
At present the club consists of three young people who as of this week get together from 2-5 pm to do joint activities. Soon we hope to increase the number to 6 people with an intellectual disability. We have opted to start with a small group so that we can make use of our initial experiences to expand and improve our way of working.
Because we are pioneering we don’t have a clear road map. In the concrete activities of every day we will need to address issues that require our attention. We don’t have the luxury of, as it were, a ‘ready made bed to sleep in’ Can we count on your support and prayer?