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Touching Lives
Winners of the Glasgow & West vote!
In Scotland there are over 2,500 deafblind people who live with a severe loss of both vision and hearing, and around three quarters of them are over 50. Deafblind Scotland’s Touching Lives – across the generations project will enable deafblind people over 50 to more easily contribute to their communities and to perceive themselves as valuable and active citizens.
Day-to-day life can be uniquely challenging for deafblind people, who face formidable obstacles with communication, mobility, access to information and community involvement, all issues which can be difficult for the general public to comprehend. Through this project, Touching Lives hopes to remove not only barriers associated with deafblindness but also those between generations.
Touching Lives will develop a programme to enable deafblind people to gain the necessary skills to become awareness trainers who will then go on to deliver deafblind awareness training, to schoolchildren, community groups, and relevant services. They would be available to serve as representatives on community groups. For example, school children will gain an insight to the lives of those living with deafblindness, be intrigued by touch-based communication methods, and learn skills which could serve them well later in life.
By sharing experiences with others, deafblind people over 50 will feel they contribute to the community at large, and through this will lead to an improvement in their mental health and general well being.
What the group says:
Why should people vote for you?
The Deafblind Scotland project will help transform the lives of perhaps the most isolated and marginalized group of people in society, people who face a daily battle to communicate, to move around, to interact with people and the environment, to live as functional members of their own communities. Without specialist support, deafblind people cannot participate in life as we know it. The majority of people over 50 years old have experienced some positive life experiences - gainful employment, parenthood, a meaningful social life – but when sight and hearing deteriorates, people lose these valuable facets and become uniquely isolated, resulting in feelings of anxiety, despair and a sense of having no value. This project will encourage deafblind people to develop the necessary skills to become more active in their communities.
What will you spend the money on?
When sight and hearing fail in later years, it is difficult to develop the alternative communication skills necessary to remain in touch with the world. Being forced to rely on tactile communication methods (e.g. the deafblind manual) is a total culture shock, a situation which is exacerbated on discovering that so few people in the community have the skills to reach out and talk to you.
The money will be spent on enabling deafblind people to tackle the problem themselves by becoming deafblind awareness trainers and teaching people, particularly schoolchildren, how to communicate with them; positive outcomes will also include increased confidence and well-being among the deafblind trainers, and improved intergenerational relationships. A large portion of the funding will be spent on the specialist communication and guiding support needed to ensure deafblind people can fully participate in the project, learn new skills, and then be supported to use these skills.
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