Konnections

Kerith Konnections provides support for disabled children, young people and their families, regardless of race, religion, ethnic origin, marital status, physical or mental disability.

Konnections developed as a practical expression of God's love for all people in our community.

Kerith Konnections raises awareness within the wider community of the needs of families with children who have disability and it provides a variety of services to those families.

Karen Mehta
Konnections Manager

Half Year Overview

This six month segment April-September 2010 covers what is traditionally the busiest time in the Konnections calendar. This year we not only saw our busiest time in the year, but also the busiest time ever. In large part this was due to the summer holiday short break programme, which was very well taken up, but also due to increased levels of services which we have contractually committed to through the Local authority tender we won this year.

Since April the services we provide to the local authority have predominantly been with the under 11 age group.
We were commissioned separately outside of the tender to provide 10 days to the over 11 age group which we did during the Easter and Summer school holidays.

The Aiming High for disabled children programme rolled out by central government is now in it’s 3rd year. Konnections has actively participated in this in a number of ways. We have participated in the steering group for Bracknell Forest, and have been part of the decision making processes which determined how the Aiming high programme would develop in Bracknell. We have received some capital funding to develop our equipment available for or projects, and in particular have hugely benefited from a mini bus which has already made a difference to the choices available for the children we support.

Konnections is also in receipt of the Aiming High grant for parent participation in Bracknell. With this grant we have been able to continue to promote parent participation, as we have done in the past, but with a budget that has allowed us to run some useful events, and set up some projects, such as secret shopper, which is allowing us to assess the quality of services and recreational activities for disabled children and their families. This programme will continue to run until the end of March 2011. We are waiting to hear, like many other organisations, what if anything will be available to support these activities after this date.

We continue to run our Monday night youth club in K2, as well as an informal parents group running at the same time upstairs in the K2 lounge. This group is largely self funding, due to the buildings being available to us from Kerith Community Church free of charge .

We continue to run our Mums support group on Friday mornings, and have had a number of new mums come along in the last six months. We continue to offer a programme of support, information, advocacy, outside speakers along with some pampering treats and fun.