WCMT Grant Offer

I was thrilled to receive my grant pack on Friday which informs me that the WCMT (www.wcmt.org.uk) are offering me £6000 for my travels in Oct/Nov. This is brilliant news as it allows me to plan the trip with the budget in mind and to get going with my research. Today I had a reporter from the Todmorden News come round to find out about the award and to talk to me about Purple Patch Arts. It was a great opportunity for me to let her know about the work that I am doing and how the company are working together to find new ways of supporting people with Dementia to communicate using creativity as a tool. All very excited. I sent her this picture to go with the article, it is from my last trip to Africa in 2007 and is of me with a couple of girls in a Namibian community, beautiful girls and totally inspiring me to return to Africa and meet loads of new people.

Press Release!

Upon receiving my great news last week of the Winston Churchill Trust Fellowship I decided to get in touch with the local press for all the areas in which Purple Patch Arts are working. The Trust encourage you to do this, I am not merely being really big headed, I promise!

So anyway I wrote to Harrogate, Todmorden, Craven and Manchester news editors to share this good news, thinking it would be great to raise the profile of the Trust and to share what Purple Patch and I are doing with this award. They all seem to have received the story well and I have had a couple of replies to see if I can give a bit more detail for an article, all brilliant.
Then I thought perhaps it would be nice to get in touch with Milton Keynes Citizen, as that was where I grew up, and where I went to school etc. So I rang the office there and the man said to me "It's not really news now that you don't live here, we aren't really interested in people who used to live here, we have a job enough to cover the news of all the people who live here now, so sorry we aren't interested" HILARIOUS, I'm not news in Milton Keynes, just a distant memory! I feel like Milton Keynes has divorced me! Ha ha.

Still brilliant news that we will be able to get some word out about this in the areas that Purple Patch now work, and Milton Keynes, I wish you well!

Winston Churchill Fellow 2010

"I offer my warm congratulations....."

www.wcmt.org.uk

In late 2009 I made an application to Winston Churchill Memorial Trust to fund me to undertake a research project which would see me travel firstly to Canada and then onto South Africa to explore the ways in which I could support people with non progressive dementia caused by HIV/AIDS. The proposal I submitted was based on my very limited knowledge of the way in which the virus spreads to the brain and causes non progressive dementia in some patients. Learning that people could suffer from a period of dementia which could then be cured led me to feeling a concern for the way in which these patients were being treated in the UK, as far as I could tell alongside other dementia patients who had a progressive form of the condition. I wanted to explore how we might work specifically with people with dementia who were not likely to be trapped by the condition for the rest of their lives but indeed may come through that period and have the ability to retain all of the cognitive functionality of their previous lives. It occurred to me that should I ever have such a condition I would so long for some way of retaining my creative engagement throughout the phase/period of dementia in order that once cured I would be able to continue to practice and to return to the same place my practice was at. I also wanted to explore whether creative forms of communication could indeed speed the recovery of people with non progressive dementia in order that they might be able to unleash old memories and reengage their minds into the thought processes that existed prior to the dementia. I don't know if any of this is possible, I am not by any means a medical expert or in fact a medical anything. I work with people with learning disabilities and some people with dementia to inspire create adventure in their lives. I do this alongside my two colleagues through our organisation Purple Patch Arts. Upon my return from this period of research I hope that we will, as a team be able to enhance our creative work with people with dementia, with an enhanced understanding of the different causes of the condition and a bag full of new techniques shared and borrowed from our international colleagues working as experts in the field of dementia.

So I thank you Winston Churchill Trust for your support, for making this research possible and for investing in my time to undergo such an opportunity. Watch this space as I hopefully gain knowledge, insight and experience into the creative mind.

Kay