What is People First (Self-Advocacy)?

People First is an organisation run by and for people with learning difficulties to raise awareness of and campaign for the rights of people with learning difficulties and to support self advocacy groups across the country.

People First promotes the social model of disability. This is a way of thinking about disability that says it is society that needs to change to include disabled people. We should not have to change to fit in with society. We are against the medical model of disability, which is the view that being disabled means there is ‘something wrong’ with you. Doctors and teachers and other professionals put labels on us marking us out as different form everyone else. It is these labels which get in the way and stop us taking part the same as anyone else, for example people labelled as having a learning difficulty get sent to special schools and then on to day centres when what we would really like is to get a job; we get put in group homes to live with other people with the same label, with whom we didn’t choose to live, when we would prefer to live on our own with support or with a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Who is People First for?

People First (Self Advocacy) welcomes support and interest from everyone but only people with learning difficulties and self advocacy groups run by people with learning difficulties can join as full members with voting rights.

What do we mean by Learning Difficulties?

At People First (Self Advocacy), when we talk about people with learning difficulties, we mean ‘people labelled as having a learning difficulty’. This is one of the labels that society puts on us to mark us out as not being able to understand things the same as other people. People First (Self Advocacy) is set up for people labelled as having a learning difficulty. 

At People First we do not think in terms of medical labels like ‘autism’ or ‘Down’s Syndrome’. We don’t look at what doctors say is ‘wrong with us’. We look at people’s support needs. All people have different kinds of support needs – some people need a shoulder to cry on every now and again, some people needs help understanding instruction manuals, some people need a push to get out of a chair.

Some people need particular kinds of learning support day to day for reading and writing, remembering and understanding long words and complicated ideas. At People First (Self Advocacy) we make sure that the people who work here get the support they need to do their jobs. Workers need learning support but the supporters providing the learning support will have their own support needs too, for example, flexible working hours if they have children or a sign language interpreter if they are deaf.

Why Learning Difficulty and not Learning Disability?

At People First (Self Advocacy) we believe that people labelled as having a learning difficulty are disabled by society. We choose to use the term ‘learning difficulty’ instead of ‘learning disability’ to get across the idea that our learning support needs change over time. With good support we can become more independent and do more for ourselves. Support needs are also different in different environments, which means they are different in different places and with different people, for example in a place where a person feels more confident their support needs can be lower but if they are nervous in a new place their support needs may be higher. This is different from a physical disability where a person may always need the same amount of support.  It is negative to try to ‘cure’ people instead of giving them physical assistance to carry on their lives the same as anyone else. It is positive to give people with learning difficulties good support to become more independent.

What is Self Advocacy?

 

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