News and Events News June 2020 Newsletter Normality is in the air Well, welcome! I am writing this on a very sunny and hot day, and I am pleased to say that normality is fast approaching! Now, of course we still need to keep a safe distance between each other, and wear protective face masks when necessary, but our day to day lives seem to be somewhat normal. While our drop-in groups are not yet open, we have successfully adapted our groups online. Read on, to hear about how we have transformed the way we are helping people with aphasia in the UK. ZOOM Online video calls for people with aphasia. Well, Spring wasn’t quite as we had expected it to be! We have all had to adapt and change how we work and live in one way or another. Thankfully we have risen to the challenge and we were able to carry on with our drop in groups. Except that instead of being in person, we moved our group online! Thanks to Zoom! And the thing that we have found has worked well for us, is that we can meet people with aphasia from across the country! Our 10 drop in groups have been able to come together and meet each other. Our friends in up North in Skipton can say hello to our friends down South in Brighton! And others who have aphasia who do not live near one of our drop-in groups can now join in our online group! We like to keep positive here at Say Aphasia, and so realising we could now do online support groups was very much a blessing in disguise, considering the circumstances. If you know someone who has aphasia and may benefit from having support from Say Aphasia. Please let us know. What our service users have said about our online group chats: Tim: "Zoom chats have allowed me to see, and keep better ‘in touch’ with friends throughout the latter part of this awful period. Additionally, the chats have helped to broaden the geographical range of participants, thereby adding to interest and experiences." David: "I think it's marvoulous. I think it's absolutely bloody wonderful!" Paul: "It's nice to see everyone. It's quite good.. Zoom it's quite nice. I can sit in my garden." Eric: "I get my niece to help me. I'm waiting for lockdown to finish so I can get in my van". Nick: "The Zoom - great! Do choir, work, aphasia group." Mon: "I rely on Zoom a lot. I meet up with all of you twice a week, as well as family and other people. We are connected to our church too." Mark: "Zoom is excellent! Massively beneficial to everyone!" Wendy: "I think it's really good. It works well and you can talk to everyone." Phil: "It's good. It's really brilliant. And everyone takes the time to listen. The way it's run by Say Aphasia is brilliant" WhatsApp Group Chat People with aphasia in the UK can now join our small WhatsApp chat to stay connected. You can catch up with friends and send messages, images, articles, links - anything! WhatsApp allows you to have a friendly conversation with people who can relate to you and your struggles. There is no judgement and everyone's aphasia is different. You may be better at talking, and so you may find it easier to send a voice message. You may be better at drawing and send drawings from your phone. You may want to send a video of yourself. You may want to share photos. Technology has made it easier for us to communicate in many ways. If you are in the UK, and would like to join this group, please fill out this form. A moment to pay our respects. What a time it has been. We would like to take a moment, to share our condolences to the lives lost. Whether as a direct result from the coronavirus, or indirectly. For many, it has been a devastating few months. If you need any support from us. Please get in contact. Fundraising during the pandemic. As you will already be aware, all our usual fundraising events have been cancelled due to coronavirus. Such as The Crafty Dog Festival on Saturday 13th June, and the London to Brighton bike ride. And aphasia awareness events such as Paddle Round the Pier in Brighton, and many summer community festivals. However, this pandemic forced us to move our fundraising online, and so we ran our first online pub quiz! And thanks to you, we raised £295! Additional funds can help us put plans in place to evolve the support we offer, and to also fund plans to help raise awareness and understanding of aphasia, with an even bigger impact. Follow our progress over the next few months as we bring our plans to fruition. You can get regular updates on instagram, facebook or twitter. Latest Grants We have received a grant from Ian Askew Trust and Sussex Community Foundation. To see our latest grants, you can keep up to date here: Click here for LATEST GRANTS If you ever want to see what we have been up to in-between our quarterly newsletters, just check out our ‘news’ section on our website: Click here for LATEST NEWS Online Speech Therapy We are very excited to be running our own online speech therapy sessions with the help of some excellent speech therapists. And we are offering this service for free to people in the UK who have recently been discharged from hospital with aphasia. We have enough funding to offer this service people in the UK. Who are receiving 6 sessions each. We will have some progress reports at the end of the 6 weeks. Without our free speech therapy, these people would have not been able to pay for the therapy they need from private speech therapists during the pandemic. If you know someone who is in great need of speech therapy, please fill out this form, incase we have funding for more people. Top Tip for family members who are new to aphasia One BIG top tip given by people with aphasia, to those who have a partner who has recently been diagnosed with aphasia is: Have plenty of PATIENCE and give lots of TIME for the person with aphasia to speak. Raise Money When You Shop Online! There are so many ways you can help us receive donations, and it doesn’t even need to come out of your pocket! Many retailers are donating a small percentage when you shop online with them through fundraising platforms such as Give As You Live, Easy Fundraising, Go Raise. We would like to kindly ask you to register to platforms such as Give As You Live, Easy Fundraising, Go Raise. Select just one of these platforms, and register with them. You can then use their website or use their app on your phone to shop thousands of retailers. Each purchase you make means that Say Aphasia will receive a small donation from the retailer. So just think, every time you buy something online, you could be helping to raise money - at no extra cost to you! Need more information? Just send us an email! Thank you very much to those of you who have already signed up to Give As You Live! The donations are (slowly but surely) rolling in! Getting our aphasia booklets in hospitals We want to reach more people in hospital who have recently been diagnose with aphasia. We would like all UK hospitals to have the Say Aphasia information booklet to be available to aphasia patients and their families to help them through their life changing experience. Over the next few months we will be contacting hospitals to make this happen. If you have any ideas to help us with this, please get in contact. Contact Say Aphasia Hello From Our Skipton Peer Leaders “A big hello from the Say Aphasia Skipton Group! We have all survived 13 weeks of lockdown and have kept in touch with most of the group thanks to Email, Facebook and Zoom! Thank goodness for technology! Our group have celebrated birthdays and anniversaries in lockdown and one thing is for sure, the pub is greatly missed. As one member of the Skipton group wrote - I miss my teatime at the pub with my friends as the vocabulary was varied from that which I use at home. Sue doesn’t “talk football!” Mark has made some new friends on his early morning walks. Cath, one of our volunteers, has been making some eye catching face masks and other volunteers have enjoyed some scenic walks in the lovely Yorkshire countryside, whilst other members of the group have been keeping busy at their allotments. So, although the Skipton Say Aphasia group has not been able to meet in person at the moment, we are getting through lockdown in our own way and we will......meet again! Take care everyone and look after yourselves, best wishes from the Say Aphasia Skipton Group” A guide to getting online The Stroke Association have produced a pdf guide to try to help people with aphasia get online. Please have a look, and let us know if it has been helpful. Click here to see the PDF GUIDE Our online shop We are now selling protective face masks on our online shop! And our new t-shirt design! We wanted to have a new t-shirt design that we thought the general public would be interested in buying and wearing, which will help us raise awareness of this charity and of aphasia. We liked the idea of a line drawing design as this seems to be very popular at the moment in art. A lot of wall art for homes are line drawings. We would like to have more designs in the future which will attract the general public, and help us get the charity name spoken about more, so than we can raise understanding of aphasia. In-Kind Donations Do you work for a company who are able to give in-kind donations? What exactly is ‘in-kind donations?’, I hear you ask. In-kind donations, also referred to as gifts in kind, is a charitable giving in which, instead of giving money to buy needed goods and services, the goods and services themselves are given. Also goods are given to add to fundraising raffles. Do you work for a company who can offer in-kind donations? Send us an email to help us Thank you so much for taking the time to read our newsletter. You can send us a comment or message below. We would love to hear from you! And if you haven't yet, please sign up to our email list to receive updates on what we are up to, and our quarterly newsletter! Manage Cookie Preferences