Travel Champions and Learning Disability Week

During #BetterTransportWeek and #LearningDisabilityWeek we're celebrating our Travelling with Confidence project that puts people with lived experience of learning disabilities and autism at the heart of the project.

In this blog, here from our Travel Champions who help lead the project.

We are the Your Voice Counts Travel Champions

"Our names are Jodie, Melissa, Lee and Karen and we work for Your Voice Counts. We are lived experience staff. We have lived experience of either learning disabilities or autism. Our role is to work as Travel Champions.

"This means we show and support other to travel more independently.

"We help people become more confident planning journeys on public transport and dealing with unexpected problems that can happen along the way. We also help people think about how they can keep themselves safe when using public transport.

"We do quality checks on public transport including metros, buses, and trains to see how accessible they are. We feedback this information to transport providers on what is working and what isn’t working so well. We recently did a quality check on the train from Newcastle to York.

"We deliver training across Gateshead and South Tyneside to different groups of learners so they can gain knowledge and confidence using public transport. We helped some people learn the routes to their work placements. We use our own experiences to show other that they can also learn how to travel independently.

"On the 15th of June we talked about our role as Travel Champions at the launch of Learning Disability week at the Word in South Shields. We were a bit nervous before the event, but we practiced our speech, took our time, and told everyone about the great work we do as travel champions."