The Trendsetters project

Read the Trendsetters blog!

These young people’s web pages and Meeting Point forum are the first products of a project involving Scope Response and a group of young disabled people – our Trendsetters.

The Trendsetters project started in late 2009 and came about because the Scope Response team were receiving lots of enquiries from parents and carers about children and young people with cerebral palsy feeling isolated, different, left out, angry and not understood. We were asked for information specifically produced for children and young people, and realised that within Scope we didn’t actually have a service that met the needs of this age group, the 10 to 18 year olds.

We quickly recruited a core group of 12 Trendsetters (now grown to 17 members) and worked with them to identify the kind of support and information they wanted to have available for them and for other people. Much of the work was carried out in the last 12 months over a secure, online forum and in two face-to-face group workshops. The ideas gained from this  are now starting to come together, and the Trendsetters are working with us to produce information and resources for these web pages to help support other disabled young people who may be facing the same issues as them.

The top request from our Trendsetters was for the online forum to continue, so that they could safely chat to other young disabled people about the issues affecting them, and so Meeting Point was set up. Our original forum, Trendsetters, is still running, and we intend to use this as a discussion area between Scope and young disabled people who want to be involved in producing information and resources and being part of the Trendsetters project.

For more information about the project, or to apply to join the Trendsetters project working group, please contact us.