North Wales Supported Employment Service Citizen Panel

We are people from all over North Wales, we come from Anglesey, Conwy, Gwynedd, Wrexham, Flintshire and Denbighshire.

We are people with a lived experience of a learning disability.

We are people who are looked at differently in everyday situations. We are looked at differently when it comes to working in a job.

We have different skills and experiences. Some of us have had paid jobs, some of us have volunteer jobs. We all have a different experience of having a learning disability and we live different daily lives.

Something we all have in common is that we advocate for our own voices and for other people.

We work as part of North Wales Together.

We work with them to develop good ideas.

We look at their work and tell them if something needs to change

We have given advice about:

• Making evaluation and feedback questions easy to understand for people with learning disabilities
• Making the big yearly reports simple and interesting so that people with learning disabilities can read them
• Making leaflets about supported employment easy to understand
  

We have worked on:

• Ways to get feedback from people who used the Supported Employment Service
• Choosing what type of information people might want to hear about
• How to share information with people with learning disabilities and their families

We are a team of experts, and we work hard.

We do most of our work online, but we get together in person for big meetings. Sometimes we meet in smaller groups to do some work.

We make our work plans and keep up to date on WhatsApp and on email.

Kim is the regional lead for the North Wales Supported Employment Service. She gives us problems to solve and jobs to do. We work as a team and decide what advice to give to Kim.

Sometimes we hold a meeting and work with professionals on new ideas and different ways of working. Sometimes we write a report. Sometimes we make videos.

We are not only here for the money! We are here to succeed and be part of the community.

It makes us feel proud to be paid for our work. But it’s more than that, we are being useful, and we are being valued as experts.

Our work shows other people what we can do, not what we can’t do.

Having a job helps us be more independent.

It feels good to be part of something important for people with learning disabilities in North Wales. It is good to be part of making the North Wales Supported Employment Service work well.