Changing the world through peer research

Blog from Lindsay Henderson, Head of Communities at Your Voice Counts

Your Voice Counts has a super power and that is its belief in how lived experience can help change things for the better - and what better way to change the world than through peer research?

I have been an advocate for peer research for many years, using it throughout my career and here at Your Voice Counts we have taken a big step forward in our quest to build our peer research resource. A couple of years ago we conducted some peer research into the experiences of people's being diagnosed as autistic as adults (you can read about that here). This was commissioned by the NENC ICB, we did a great job and the pride in this gave us a flavour to do more.

Through our contacts at the Lawnmowers Theatre Company, we then started building more relationships within the research world and to date we have submitted a number of funding bids in partnership with Sunderland University (shout out to Professor Sarah Lonbay!) to gather evidence around key challenges in the lives of people we support - fingers crossed they are successful!

Even more excitingly however, in April I started an eleven week Introduction to Public Involvement and Co-Production in Research Course at Northumbria University along with Shaun Armour and Anthony Lowes from our team. Shaun is a Commissioning Officer and Learning Disability Trainer with lived experience while Anthony is a Community Project Worker.

It's amazing and a groundbreaking approach to research training, focused on bringing lived experience to the fore and the tutors Cat Meredith, Toby Brandon, Mick Hill and Chris Gibbs are really supportive. There is an assessment at the end which will give participants 20 credits towards a degree which is fab and we all hope to go on to study the next stage of the course if possible. When the opportunity arises we will offer further places on the course to more people in our organisation because we've made a great link with the University now.

Anthony played a key role in our autism peer research project and is going to use his training to support our Community Voice Project across Gateshead and South Tyneside. Shaun will use his newfound skills in his Commissioning role, particularly as part of his role is to lead the Voice of Person workstream of the learning disabilities strategy for South Tyneside.

It's all very exciting and I'm so proud of how far we've come in a short time, maybe changing this world won't take so long after all!

Lindsay, Anthony and Shaun