Striking it lucky at Your Ideas!

During half term we took our Spectrum Orange group AND Spectrum Red group to Hollywood Bowl in Rubery to try their luck at a game of bowling.

It’s June already?!

Apologies for the lack of posts recently, we have doubled our workload this year and have really struggled to find time to keep the blog up to date!

The two big projects that we have been getting off the ground this year are –  

-Support Across the Spectrum which is funded by The Big Lottery Fund and enables us to work with young people aged 15-25 who have Asperger’s to reduce social isolation.

On your marks, get set, BLOG!

As part of our ever expanding Support Across the Spectrum project funded by the Big Lottery our members have created their very own blog. It is for our Spectrum members to upload reviews of anything and everything!

Spectrum member and volunteer Tom is the webmaster who created the blog, writes reviews and also supports other members to not only write their own reviews but teaches them how to upload them too.

The reviews are generally about computer games, movies and music at the moment as that’s what interests our members. They are all written reviews at the moment but we are currently working on some video interview style reviews too, thanks to our new video camera donated by Phil Haslam of HSL Roadside.

We now have 4 reviewers who are uploading to the site and already have more who are interested in getting involved.

To check out their blog – http://spectrumreviews.com/

If you or anyone you know has Aspergers and would be interested in getting involved then contact us for more information – kayleighfitzgerald@yourideas.org.uk or 01527 502624

Here at Your Ideas we got SAS!

In November we kicked off our Support Across the Spectrum project which is a development of our existing Spectrum Club sessions. We were successful in receiving funding for the next 5 years by the Big Lottery Reaching Communities Fund (whoohoo!!) The Spectrum Club for those who don’t already know is our work with youngsters who have Aspergers Syndrome.

So this meant the Spectrum Club went from fortnightly Thursday evening sessions for younger (Spectrum Orange) and older (Spectrum Red) members to weekly sessions for both groups and much much more…

The Support Across the Spectrum project has three main aims-

1) Reduce isolation of people with ASD

2) Increase independence of people with ASD

3) Increase mental and physical well being of people with ASD

This is taking the form of weekly friendship groups, weekly drop in, group trips, internal and external volunteering opportunities, film projects, festivals, steering group, review website, monthly social games console nights, healthy lifestyle and independent living skills activities and projects and much more!

Check out the slideshow below to see for yourself what we have already been up to with our brilliant Spectrum project…

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The hills are alive with the sound of… hard work!

One chilly Saturday morning a small team from Your Ideas Spectrum Club descended upon the Lickey Hills to help clear the heathland areas with the Lickey Hills Society.

Another successful year at Your Ideas Redditch

Firstly we would like to wish you all a belated Happy New Year from all at Your Ideas!

Secondly we would like to share some of our highlights from 2012…

Reason to celebrate at Your Ideas!

For those who haven’t been hearing every 2 minutes on our twitter (@your_ideas), we have been successful with our Big Lottery Reaching Communities bid!!! This is to develop the Spectrum club – our work with young people with Aspergers Syndrome for the next 5 years and we are so pleased.