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Housing and Support

Presented by Doreen Kelly and Dr Cassandra Lovelock

Joined by David Holt and Adam Russell

Content Warning: Suicide

How the need for support impacts on the design of a person’s home; an exploration of the interplay between housing and support, and the impact of the presence of staff on people’s sensory and social processing. Examples of how the right housing design, alongside personalised support provision, can facilitate people to thrive, and a discussion about what this means for commissioners.  

  • Director of Beyond Limits

    Doreen started her career as a mental health nurse but soon moved to work in the voluntary sector, she has worked in the voluntary and independent sector since 1986 to help people become full and active citizens. During this time supporting many people to leave institutions. She has been involved in setting up several small, person-centred organisations in both England and Scotland. Doreen is the Director of Beyond Limits, an organisation that supports people who have labels of being challenging and complex to support. Beyond Limits use a tailored approach and Individual Health Budgets (IHB’s) in the form of an Individual Service Fund (ISF). Beyond Limits supports people to come back home from institutional care environments and to take up their rightful place in their community by offering the tailored support that people need to do this successfully.

  • Cassie (she/they) is a Black mixed-race wheelchair user living with chronic illness and neurodivergence. She is a scholar activist whose work focuses on ethical, community based and lived experience led research, education, and policy making practice within the fields of mental health, neurodiversity, unpaid care, critical disability studies, and race studies.

    As an academic, Cassie's current work focuses on the intersections of poverty, mental illness, and support from the welfare state in the UK and ethical ways of co-producing knowledge and knowledge equity among communities that are disempowered within mental health, social care, and welfare services in the UK. She is a lead lived experience consultant in NHS England's adult mental health, and mental health, autism and learning disability quality transformation teams.

    Outside of work Cassie mostly reads fiction, writes poetry, and hangs out with her cat.

  • I am the Chief Housing & Development Officer for Choice Support who I have worked for, for over 16 years, I am a chartered surveyor and a member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors and have worked in Housing & Development for over 35 years.

    I have worked in partnership with NHSE and various local authorities to deliver many projects through the transforming care programme and the department of health re-provision programme, delivering core and cluster models, single person services, respite and mental health forensic step down services. I have a passion for delivering flexible housing models that will make a difference for the people we support and I am passionate about creating the right environment and learning from the things that do not work.

    Collaboration and sharing ideas is key to delivering successful housing and I look forward to sharing these in forums such as the Housing Summit.

Disclaimer  

At Neurodiverse Connection, we are committed to promoting the use of neurodivergent affirming language. However, please do note that in these webinars, as with any content that Neurodiverse Connection host or share that includes input from other organisations or parties, we cannot guarantee that the preferred neurodivergent affirming terminology is always used.  

Our guide to language is available here: Neurodivergent Affirming Language

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Next
12 June

An Introduction to Designing Homes for Autistic People with Sensory Differences