Our Impact

We make magic together. We see the impact of our work on a daily basis, in the increased wellbeing, confidence, independence and communication skills of our participants, and the ripple effect this has on their support networks.

Participant Voice

All of our work is driven by the voices of our participants, through our Purple Steering Group, our Participant Consultations, our evaluation work, and our reflection work.

Purple Steering Group

Our Purple Steering Group is a group of Lifelong Learning Programme participants who use their experiences and knowledge to act as a bridge between the Board and our participants. You can read all about them here.

Consultation

Our innovative Participant Consultations allow us to understand the wants, needs, struggles and lives of our participants, which drives the direction of the organisation as a whole. The outcomes inform our work on a much wider scale, feeding into our Programmes, Projects, trading and outreach work.

Evaluation

Evaluation helps us to understand and evidence our impact and make sure that we are achieving our aims as an organisation! As an organisation that fosters a culture of learning and development, we embed evaluation into everything we do, and regularly reflect on feedback to improve and grow.

Reflection

By embedding reflection into our approach, we support participants to express their emotions and opinions in response to their experiences, and contextualise their learning within their wider lives. Creating accessible opportunities for reflection embeds learning more deeply, and better supports participants to be powerful advocates for themselves and their community.

Illustration of a woman shouting into a megaphone

The Purple Patch approach to gathering participants’ voices is the same as our approach to learning: we do it differently. Across all of our work, we ensure every participant can express themselves through innovative methods that help us to capture a true reflection of our participants’ experiences.

Traditional evaluation and feedback methods like questionnaires can exclude learning-disabled people from sharing their views. It’s important to us that every participant’s voice is heard. We use our expertise to bring questions to life, ensuring participants can engage with and understand the evaluation, consultation and reflection process in as meaningful a way as possible. We ensure our participants are supported to share their responses and ideas in a variety of ways, whether that’s through words, movements, art or something completely different. Our interactive and creative approach means our participants can express their thoughts about their experiences in the way that best suits them.

Testimonials

We are super proud of all the people we work with, and we value everyone who’s part of our purple family. We’ve seen huge transformations in our participants and staff over the years, and you can read all about it in their own words on our Testimonials page.