Our Future Direction

At Purple Patch, we work in partnership with learning-disabled people: we listen to participants, shape our work around their wants and needs, and support them to become powerful advocates for themselves and their community. We want co-production to become a more formalised part of our work, ensuring that learning-disabled people are a key part of the design, delivery, and ownership of what we do at Purple Patch Arts.

Co-production is not a new concept for us. Our Purple Steering Group is co-led by a dedicated set of participants from our Lifelong Learning Programmes who are being empowered to give us their thoughts on the running of Purple Patch, to ensure that people with lived experience are guiding the charity to be the best it can be. The Purple Steering Group regularly take part in the co-production of our work: they have inputted on our Scheme of Work, helped shape resources we have created for external organisations, and supported the creation of our key messaging. However, we believe that all learning-disabled people should be heard, not just those who step up to be advocates, like those in our Steering Group. We’re increasingly understanding the role that we play in creating safe spaces in which learning-disabled people can express themselves, and we don’t underestimate the power of this both on individuals and on society.

Our innovative Participant Consultations, designed in collaboration with our Board of Trustees and Purple Steering Group, are the first step towards ensuring that every participant has the opportunity to shape and co-produce the future work of the organisation. The outcomes of these consultations will form the basis of our Programmes’ Scheme of Work, future projects and partnerships, participant progression routes, and more.

In addition to ongoing consultation to enable the co-production of Purple Patch’s work and direction, we want to ensure participants have the opportunity to co-facilitate the work that they are designing. Again, co-facilitation is not new at Purple Patch; some participants are already leading the Programmes warm-up and cool down, participants co-facilitated workshops in our To Wander is to Adventure project, and our training sessions include videos that enable our participants to share their own views and experiences, to name just a few examples. But we know from the outcomes of our Participant Consultations that co-facilitation is something our participants want to do more of, and we are excited to create more opportunities for our participants to be meaningfully involved in the delivery of our work.

Our first Participant Consultation highlighted that social connection is by far the biggest priority of our participants. We want to ensure that we are nurturing each participant’s sense of community within, across and beyond our work, and are committed to ensuring that social connection is a central element of our future work.

At Purple Patch, we believe that learning is experiences that allow us to engage with and understand ourselves, other people, and the world around us. According to Kolb’s Model of Experiential Learning, in order to learn and grow, participants must be given the opportunity and space to reflect on their experiences, express their thoughts, feelings and opinions, and understand the experience in the context of their broader lives. We want to ensure that we are having the biggest and best impact we can on our participants and believe that aligning our approach with Kolb’s Model will open up new opportunities, benefits and innovations.

We have already begun to explore and implement opportunities for self-reflection in our Programmes and Projects, but plan to increase this so that reflection plays a much larger role in our future work. This approach is groundbreaking; as far as we know, no-one has done this with learning-disabled people before!