Reverand Will Morrey
South Wales District Chair
12 Llwyn-y-grant rd
Cardiff
CF23 9ET
Sep 28 2007
Dear Reverand Morrey,
A meeting took place between myself, Barbara Peacock, Nigel Harper, Andrew Mchardy and another member of Memory Gardens, Becky Perriman on Sept.6 at 2.30pm. It was put back from an August meeting because people went on holiday.
It was not a comfortable meeting. In fact I felt bullied and cornered.
There were many cross-references, abrupt endings, interuptions and word manoevering which quite frankly left Becky and I not knowing the full content of the words that played out.
There were accusations of misconduct made towards me.
The land has been left unprotected since the Legard Family Centre closed and I am juggling running courses and managing local youths who now regulary break in. I am also trying to ensure access through a system- which has now broken down- whereby I collect keys from London Regional office in order to gain entry to the garden.
These keys were no longer there one day when I went to pick them up at the office. No explanation was given. Another set for weekend access did not work. Everyone was on holiday. I needed to get in because I have obligations to my members and this access was promised. So I made a decision to use a spare key that I had cut as a precaution because I know that these situations arise. I am glad I did this because otherwise I would not have fulfilled my responsibilty towards the project during what now turns out to be our last summer at the garden. Did I act moraly or not? Of course NCH representatives think not, but it it not as clear-cut as that.
The decision I made to keep the garden open by making a spare key is now incriminating me and this is being used as a way of putting pressure on us to come to an early agreement on closure or otherwise to face the humiliation of being escorted down by a security gaurd whenever we wish to use the site. No community could flourish or even endure under such scrutiny. I do not know why NCH could not have trusted me as the co-ordinator of the project with a key in the first place, which would have avoided all this insult and counter insult. The keys have now been replaced but responsibility for what went wrong is not evenly shared by NCH.
The basis of the arangement is now mistrust. All my suggestions to work together are now conditional on NCH securing a date of our departure. The idea that I put forward to Clare Tickel to annex the land with Peter Bedford Mental Health project whose members attend our courses has been disregarded.
It is as I had thought in the worst case scenario. It is a “Them” and “Us” mentality with NCH trying to isolate and shame us into disapearing as quickly as possible- as if we were never really there.
I took Becky along because she knows our project inside out. She has participated creatively in the adult courses and now works with the autistic young people on a Sunday. She is an excellent qualified play-worker flowing imaginatively in and out of their physical and mental rhythms; holding and extending their sense of presence. To see her shouted down by people who ought to know better or at least ought to have better manners, shocked me. I felt pain for bringing her.
Only after the meeting when as an after thought Barbara and Andrew agreed to visit the Garden, as in fact they had promised to do, was there any kind of equal footing. Then we could be the hosts and in that short walking tour we could all become more disposed to one another as the garden guided and paced us- as it has done for our members over the years.
But already this walk and brief affinity was only made possible in their eyes because the goal of termination was in sight.
Deep down we hold so many of the same core values but these can not be acknowledged because the representatives of NCH meeting with us feel that this would lose them time. Then to hear Nigel Harper say he regrets we were ever given permission to exist is surprising in its bluntness and it hurts.
Experience becomes good or bad by people`s shared outlook. It is not right that this outlook should be made by people who will not share in the experience or admit to sharing in it.
I deeply regret the way this ending is being played out by NCH. It is not representative of the day to day reality that is being lived out in the garden right now, which is one which is supportive in the best way it can be. We are not perfect, but we exist.
I need to tell you how I am feeling in this letter because rightly or wrongly I have come to associate you as a keeper of the whole picture. I hope this does not inconvenience you.
I am not expecting an intervention but I do want this to be on record as my version of the story as it is unfolding. Undoubtedly you will have other versions too.
Thanks,
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinator, Memory Gardens
Legard rd, N5 London
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Leaping Between certainties
23 Oct 2008
How can we begin with the minutiae of what people do and not use it as a distraction but as a fundamental component of learning?
How do people learn? How do autistic people learn?
Are they manually activating a synaptic leap- leaping into the unknown with the faith they will reach the other side- half flying half propelling- using surfaces like parkhor experts who gain footholds on railings, slopes and banisters- feeling out the landscape according to utility in a mobile navigation.
Response is about responsiveness but this needs to be activated- it is not up and running but needs to be practised. The brain and the body is not a self defining unit. Nor is it fully formed at birth. There is a learning interchange where our endings become the open circuit to something else. Systems are forged together- slammed together- cobbled together- conjoint systems that create momentary vacuums like the air trapped between the clap of two hands- impossible to know or elicit that sound without the ensuing action- the speed of this coming together- the bounce or a coming undone- two directives exploding into sound- that is a crafting immersed in the moment.
Autism is a learning program- the questions it opens up is about how we learn. It is an enactment of a process of activation. The techniques of autism- spinning, flicking, bouncing- stimming- momentary explosions of sound – composed sensory overloads that create threshold responses and send the parkour leaper into oblivion and over to the other side. A monitoring of synaptic firings that otherwise never get going or double and redouble into a labyrinth that if unchecked would tangle into immobility.
How to use that excess- the never-ending multiplication to go somewhere- or else to cobble together resonating chambers- informational pockets that reverberate and echo and harvest their own bifurcations.
Interesting. How do we learn from our own learning- from the strata of responses in between the chosen and accredited pitch frequencies or the colour red or blue? How to mix the palette and have it mean something even when it is not translatable into a chronological scale?
Memory- How to mix up events- rotate ourselves into different composite support structures that somehow lean up against one another and before collapsing, or moving on into a different sculpture, recognise position.
This has to be done from within the situation itself- from the practices already underway. Physically enacting ones own synaptic firing system can be exhausting as the testimony of any autistic person and their periods of over bearing tiredness, irritability, anger and melt-down will tell you.
Environments need to be sounding boards- open circuits for momentary inclusion that activates not only one synapse, one person, one surface but a network of inter-activating responses that can hold one another in a certain charge, and then allow for rest, for a period of release from a necessary but provisional constraint.
Sensitivity can be used when navigation is an on-going enquiry into multiple dimensions- objects are never closed- nor are persons- they come into existence and become what they are as the seal of a contact is made- like the articulation of the vocal chords through a certain pressure chamber in the labyrinth and the elastic mobility of the lips that seal, purse, puck and then allow in to the body a fresh trail of air at just the right moment. Soundings are crafted, sculpted in this way, in tandem with our need to take in air and redistribute its components according to what is most useable by our systems.
From gesture to sound to thought to expression- an interflow that is not causal but a simultaneous generation of one to another- the pressing into place of a haptic patterned circuit- a modulation of depth through an active gaging that is mediated from opposing sides.Where is the surface- the wall, the skin, the organ of apperception? It is situated through alignments which is a staged forging of space.
Perspective is a meaningless abstraction that depends on our pretending that the body could ever be still.
Waiting at a platform for a train- bodies jostle, sway- accommodate a further jet of passengers from the stairwell. The signal lights, rumble of the tracks- we sway from foot to foot, not together as one unit but accommodating one another into sudden absences and fillings. The on-off pump is enacted at every level from the infinitesimally small to the gross and through it all we realise our presence- a molecular adaptation of indentations and incursions- fingers, eye-brows, slight rockings from the balls of our feet to our toes- ankle bones bracing and giving way- hips re-angling into minute tilts and inversions reapropriating the bulk of our standing weight. Gasps of air flooding systems and transgressing borders to bond with blood and become, what essentially they are not. But just because it is not that outside our bodies does not mean it is not that inside our bodies. We are systems of negotiation spanning impossible islands. To be upright- to be more or less still is a continual set of tiny tectonic shifts and compromises. We are crafting that integrity all the time through near falls, by sacrificing the integrity of impossible categories.
Boats on the river Thames- muddy water in the dark, picking up and reflecting out lights from the towering glass buildings all around. The bridge that spans a section of the river- lit up red on one façade- that red tumbling into the water- colouring it without ever penetrating it.
Could the boats be stilled- manufactured never to move even with the distractions of continual ebbs and flows, currents and jetties that constantly pile up the water in localised enclaves and cause it to crash and collapse in on itself? The idea is ludicrous to create an absolutely still boat. The only still boat is a sunken boat- one lying at the bottom of the muddy river where the water fills every space – caresses and wears away the very outline that describes it as a boat until it barely resembles it- certainly does not function as one.
Into City Hall- a conference on Autism hosted by the TV presenter Jon Snow who finally gets up from behind the table and whose mobile presence encourages debate, along with the chromatised colour tie- that is more of an activation than the material of some of the speakers.But it is hard to still a debate in this way between the polar opposites between a “Cure” campaign and a “We exist” campaign.
Hosted in the name of a school, it is in the name of schooling that the debate needs to configure. Not “cure us” or “accept us for who we are” but engage in the minutiae of the practices that are undertaken as a way of activating on-going awareness; on-going presence. There needs to be a questioning of what it actually takes to be present- of the price paid for a kind of immobile myth of distance learning- of concepts before experience, of uprightness before modulation. Of the impossible dream of a presentation of functionality with everything else erased or discouraged in the schooling process. Would we be left with any kind of adaptable system if this were the goal? Can we abstract sociability, sitting behind desks, asking for what we want, without the complex and mediated interface of a haptic negotiating- an on-going plasticity of word and deed and thought and form? Of an always bargained for presence?
If we look at this level of activity, even in the supposedly non-normative we may find the filaments of a system that can work and adapt, renew and alter- in other words of a learning system. When it is recognised as such, encouraged and furthered as such it becomes this.
How do we employ the countless acts that are put outside of learning- the distractions when we are looking out the window at the play of lights on the river, the feel of the soft pad of our fingers against the grained wood of a desk, the rise and fall of voices that do not agree as a kind of musicality, the tensile muscles, slightly aching in the small of our back and their connection to our neck muscles keeping our head up. Our chest, our breathing pattern, our air passages. The gravitational shifts as we tilt our head from side to side to try to stay awake. And through all this a reattribution of our sense of looking- a perception that goes all the way through the body and shifts and adapts between muscle and bone and organ as we too adapt and shift between ourselves even far from the point of touch.
How do we let these things in as meaningful without every interaction becoming so intense as to be unbearable? Here is the crux of the debate- a question of consciousness. Of how we honestly manage ourselves and others. Of how we behave and acknowledge the connections, even across vast chasms of identity and of people and of ways of being seemingly different from ourselves.
How much more would the debate shift and modulate to accommodate and make use of these differences if we were all moving- constantly arriving like a never ending influx from the stairwell that is a curvature a continual arrival as people descend, wrapping around the glass interior of city hall in order to occupy their chosen and fixed seats.
Is that final arrangement workable for the leap that is needed between the “cure us” and the “we exist” camps? Would not a different configuration work better- one which mirrors the practices of activation so necessary and literal to autistic people and at every level to all forms of creative and mobile learning?
What about making a learning environment within the flowing spiral inside out-ness of city hall, which lets in the river whilst embracing passers by on the river bank? Which lends itself to this poetic composition. Surely this inside-out approach that inspired the special practice of the architect who proposed such a building could be part of the learning experience as an on-going proposition. No longer a distraction of boats passing to the inner workings of focused utterances, but a literal metaphor for turning things over, navigation, mobility of course through constant adjustment and a working with environmental shifts as a way of guiding perception. Rather than spending energy locking out the random passing ship, the autistic heckler in the crowd, why not make such an element central.
What about a market place? Small sites of special interest known to autistic people in their art practices, spinning practices, haptic formulations, sculptural and bodily configurations displayed as a casual conglomeration of stalls where the space between the walking between stalls- grouped sitting areas, areas too to move in and move through are equally important.
To have that open space would mean that many more people who would be excluded from the seating arrangement and the need for verbally tuning in whilst continually and exhaustively repressing the activation from other sources of input could be involved- indeed central to a present research environment of actually happening practices.
Not only John with his coloured tie could move around, or the camera man, crouching, hopping and stooping to perceive but not to be perceived. Suddenly the entire environment could be put to use as a roaming pacing device for activating conversation in its broadest meaning. The camera and the reporter would roam as well picking up elements and engaging practitioners, autistic and not autistic, within this necessarily bubbling and chaotic market-place.Fragments would be picked up, other things slip through. Autists would present not their pathologies but their techniques for activating thought, meaning, memory; their special interests; their roaming focus. And research would be the conjoint coming together of these practitioners, neurologists, care workers, doctors, teachers, siblings. The definition of who the heckler became would constantly shift, from autist, to researcher, to teacher, to sibling in a democracy of dispersed practices that represented very many different takes on expertise. They would need to thrash it out together by entering into very many different platforms of experience. That would necessarily put different views of the world at a disadvantage and at an advantage at different times.
A working method would be developed through such encounters, rather than two already closed camps arguing their corners in static verbal exchanges that already discredit the foundation of certain types of mobile learning by the very seating arrangement.
Over the duration of such working practices, rather than pitching words against actions, “cure” against “let us be”, the them/us factions would become less clearly defined in an investigation of what it means to learn and how different learning systems have been fashioned from out of every day practice within the neurological, social, physical, environmental condition that each person find themselves belonging to would open up a discussion that implicated every person’s subjectivity- where the observer and the observed coincided.
This might open up the debate about how we can learn about learning and take ideas about awareness- about what it means to be social, to be thinking, to be feeling, to be human, out of their rather jaded boxes. For these do not do credit to any of our capabilities.
In this age of networked involvements, autism and haptic learning styles could be a way of exploring dispersed knowledge systems, not of re-enacting Wild West clean-up or shoot out programs between the untamed “Indian” and the law abiding “citizen”. Surely that particular story line has got us into enough problems already.
Autism is an excuse to open a discussion about how we develop rather than to close it up into criteria of those who can and those who can’t develop. It is a chance to ask questions about why and how we learn differently and given that we do learn differently ,how best to support learning in all its various capacities, formations and growths. It is at this recognition of differences in perception that learning necessarily deepens into various techniques for approaching age old human questions that we all share. In that sense we must all become continuous researchers of our own methods and practices and to use this as a basis for perceiving other practices and the ways of knowing that they open out.
Ruth Solomon
How can we begin with the minutiae of what people do and not use it as a distraction but as a fundamental component of learning?
How do people learn? How do autistic people learn?
Are they manually activating a synaptic leap- leaping into the unknown with the faith they will reach the other side- half flying half propelling- using surfaces like parkhor experts who gain footholds on railings, slopes and banisters- feeling out the landscape according to utility in a mobile navigation.
Response is about responsiveness but this needs to be activated- it is not up and running but needs to be practised. The brain and the body is not a self defining unit. Nor is it fully formed at birth. There is a learning interchange where our endings become the open circuit to something else. Systems are forged together- slammed together- cobbled together- conjoint systems that create momentary vacuums like the air trapped between the clap of two hands- impossible to know or elicit that sound without the ensuing action- the speed of this coming together- the bounce or a coming undone- two directives exploding into sound- that is a crafting immersed in the moment.
Autism is a learning program- the questions it opens up is about how we learn. It is an enactment of a process of activation. The techniques of autism- spinning, flicking, bouncing- stimming- momentary explosions of sound – composed sensory overloads that create threshold responses and send the parkour leaper into oblivion and over to the other side. A monitoring of synaptic firings that otherwise never get going or double and redouble into a labyrinth that if unchecked would tangle into immobility.
How to use that excess- the never-ending multiplication to go somewhere- or else to cobble together resonating chambers- informational pockets that reverberate and echo and harvest their own bifurcations.
Interesting. How do we learn from our own learning- from the strata of responses in between the chosen and accredited pitch frequencies or the colour red or blue? How to mix the palette and have it mean something even when it is not translatable into a chronological scale?
Memory- How to mix up events- rotate ourselves into different composite support structures that somehow lean up against one another and before collapsing, or moving on into a different sculpture, recognise position.
This has to be done from within the situation itself- from the practices already underway. Physically enacting ones own synaptic firing system can be exhausting as the testimony of any autistic person and their periods of over bearing tiredness, irritability, anger and melt-down will tell you.
Environments need to be sounding boards- open circuits for momentary inclusion that activates not only one synapse, one person, one surface but a network of inter-activating responses that can hold one another in a certain charge, and then allow for rest, for a period of release from a necessary but provisional constraint.
Sensitivity can be used when navigation is an on-going enquiry into multiple dimensions- objects are never closed- nor are persons- they come into existence and become what they are as the seal of a contact is made- like the articulation of the vocal chords through a certain pressure chamber in the labyrinth and the elastic mobility of the lips that seal, purse, puck and then allow in to the body a fresh trail of air at just the right moment. Soundings are crafted, sculpted in this way, in tandem with our need to take in air and redistribute its components according to what is most useable by our systems.
From gesture to sound to thought to expression- an interflow that is not causal but a simultaneous generation of one to another- the pressing into place of a haptic patterned circuit- a modulation of depth through an active gaging that is mediated from opposing sides.Where is the surface- the wall, the skin, the organ of apperception? It is situated through alignments which is a staged forging of space.
Perspective is a meaningless abstraction that depends on our pretending that the body could ever be still.
Waiting at a platform for a train- bodies jostle, sway- accommodate a further jet of passengers from the stairwell. The signal lights, rumble of the tracks- we sway from foot to foot, not together as one unit but accommodating one another into sudden absences and fillings. The on-off pump is enacted at every level from the infinitesimally small to the gross and through it all we realise our presence- a molecular adaptation of indentations and incursions- fingers, eye-brows, slight rockings from the balls of our feet to our toes- ankle bones bracing and giving way- hips re-angling into minute tilts and inversions reapropriating the bulk of our standing weight. Gasps of air flooding systems and transgressing borders to bond with blood and become, what essentially they are not. But just because it is not that outside our bodies does not mean it is not that inside our bodies. We are systems of negotiation spanning impossible islands. To be upright- to be more or less still is a continual set of tiny tectonic shifts and compromises. We are crafting that integrity all the time through near falls, by sacrificing the integrity of impossible categories.
Boats on the river Thames- muddy water in the dark, picking up and reflecting out lights from the towering glass buildings all around. The bridge that spans a section of the river- lit up red on one façade- that red tumbling into the water- colouring it without ever penetrating it.
Could the boats be stilled- manufactured never to move even with the distractions of continual ebbs and flows, currents and jetties that constantly pile up the water in localised enclaves and cause it to crash and collapse in on itself? The idea is ludicrous to create an absolutely still boat. The only still boat is a sunken boat- one lying at the bottom of the muddy river where the water fills every space – caresses and wears away the very outline that describes it as a boat until it barely resembles it- certainly does not function as one.
Into City Hall- a conference on Autism hosted by the TV presenter Jon Snow who finally gets up from behind the table and whose mobile presence encourages debate, along with the chromatised colour tie- that is more of an activation than the material of some of the speakers.But it is hard to still a debate in this way between the polar opposites between a “Cure” campaign and a “We exist” campaign.
Hosted in the name of a school, it is in the name of schooling that the debate needs to configure. Not “cure us” or “accept us for who we are” but engage in the minutiae of the practices that are undertaken as a way of activating on-going awareness; on-going presence. There needs to be a questioning of what it actually takes to be present- of the price paid for a kind of immobile myth of distance learning- of concepts before experience, of uprightness before modulation. Of the impossible dream of a presentation of functionality with everything else erased or discouraged in the schooling process. Would we be left with any kind of adaptable system if this were the goal? Can we abstract sociability, sitting behind desks, asking for what we want, without the complex and mediated interface of a haptic negotiating- an on-going plasticity of word and deed and thought and form? Of an always bargained for presence?
If we look at this level of activity, even in the supposedly non-normative we may find the filaments of a system that can work and adapt, renew and alter- in other words of a learning system. When it is recognised as such, encouraged and furthered as such it becomes this.
How do we employ the countless acts that are put outside of learning- the distractions when we are looking out the window at the play of lights on the river, the feel of the soft pad of our fingers against the grained wood of a desk, the rise and fall of voices that do not agree as a kind of musicality, the tensile muscles, slightly aching in the small of our back and their connection to our neck muscles keeping our head up. Our chest, our breathing pattern, our air passages. The gravitational shifts as we tilt our head from side to side to try to stay awake. And through all this a reattribution of our sense of looking- a perception that goes all the way through the body and shifts and adapts between muscle and bone and organ as we too adapt and shift between ourselves even far from the point of touch.
How do we let these things in as meaningful without every interaction becoming so intense as to be unbearable? Here is the crux of the debate- a question of consciousness. Of how we honestly manage ourselves and others. Of how we behave and acknowledge the connections, even across vast chasms of identity and of people and of ways of being seemingly different from ourselves.
How much more would the debate shift and modulate to accommodate and make use of these differences if we were all moving- constantly arriving like a never ending influx from the stairwell that is a curvature a continual arrival as people descend, wrapping around the glass interior of city hall in order to occupy their chosen and fixed seats.
Is that final arrangement workable for the leap that is needed between the “cure us” and the “we exist” camps? Would not a different configuration work better- one which mirrors the practices of activation so necessary and literal to autistic people and at every level to all forms of creative and mobile learning?
What about making a learning environment within the flowing spiral inside out-ness of city hall, which lets in the river whilst embracing passers by on the river bank? Which lends itself to this poetic composition. Surely this inside-out approach that inspired the special practice of the architect who proposed such a building could be part of the learning experience as an on-going proposition. No longer a distraction of boats passing to the inner workings of focused utterances, but a literal metaphor for turning things over, navigation, mobility of course through constant adjustment and a working with environmental shifts as a way of guiding perception. Rather than spending energy locking out the random passing ship, the autistic heckler in the crowd, why not make such an element central.
What about a market place? Small sites of special interest known to autistic people in their art practices, spinning practices, haptic formulations, sculptural and bodily configurations displayed as a casual conglomeration of stalls where the space between the walking between stalls- grouped sitting areas, areas too to move in and move through are equally important.
To have that open space would mean that many more people who would be excluded from the seating arrangement and the need for verbally tuning in whilst continually and exhaustively repressing the activation from other sources of input could be involved- indeed central to a present research environment of actually happening practices.
Not only John with his coloured tie could move around, or the camera man, crouching, hopping and stooping to perceive but not to be perceived. Suddenly the entire environment could be put to use as a roaming pacing device for activating conversation in its broadest meaning. The camera and the reporter would roam as well picking up elements and engaging practitioners, autistic and not autistic, within this necessarily bubbling and chaotic market-place.Fragments would be picked up, other things slip through. Autists would present not their pathologies but their techniques for activating thought, meaning, memory; their special interests; their roaming focus. And research would be the conjoint coming together of these practitioners, neurologists, care workers, doctors, teachers, siblings. The definition of who the heckler became would constantly shift, from autist, to researcher, to teacher, to sibling in a democracy of dispersed practices that represented very many different takes on expertise. They would need to thrash it out together by entering into very many different platforms of experience. That would necessarily put different views of the world at a disadvantage and at an advantage at different times.
A working method would be developed through such encounters, rather than two already closed camps arguing their corners in static verbal exchanges that already discredit the foundation of certain types of mobile learning by the very seating arrangement.
Over the duration of such working practices, rather than pitching words against actions, “cure” against “let us be”, the them/us factions would become less clearly defined in an investigation of what it means to learn and how different learning systems have been fashioned from out of every day practice within the neurological, social, physical, environmental condition that each person find themselves belonging to would open up a discussion that implicated every person’s subjectivity- where the observer and the observed coincided.
This might open up the debate about how we can learn about learning and take ideas about awareness- about what it means to be social, to be thinking, to be feeling, to be human, out of their rather jaded boxes. For these do not do credit to any of our capabilities.
In this age of networked involvements, autism and haptic learning styles could be a way of exploring dispersed knowledge systems, not of re-enacting Wild West clean-up or shoot out programs between the untamed “Indian” and the law abiding “citizen”. Surely that particular story line has got us into enough problems already.
Autism is an excuse to open a discussion about how we develop rather than to close it up into criteria of those who can and those who can’t develop. It is a chance to ask questions about why and how we learn differently and given that we do learn differently ,how best to support learning in all its various capacities, formations and growths. It is at this recognition of differences in perception that learning necessarily deepens into various techniques for approaching age old human questions that we all share. In that sense we must all become continuous researchers of our own methods and practices and to use this as a basis for perceiving other practices and the ways of knowing that they open out.
Ruth Solomon
Guidelines at the Retreat
GUIDELINES AT THE RETREAT
1. Members may book for weekly regular times-spaces in the morning or afternoon provided there is no clubs or other activities at that time Every two months this will be reviewed.
2. Members do not need to come for the full three and a half hours designated for the morning or afternoon slot. However they must come between these times, and not earlier or later.
3. When they leave they must ensure that everything they used is put away in the correct place. They must take away with them anything they have brought unless it is something that is intended for use in the garden by all members.
4. They can contribute to the space by making sculptures out of the bricks and wood found in the garden and can bring other material to the garden that they find along the way ( wooden furniture, bricks, plastic tubing, leaves, feathers etc ..) to be used in these sculptures. Members must use their judgement to ensure that what they bring to the garden is safe.
5. They can alter any sculptures or works that they find throughout the garden provided they respond and add to what is there already.
6. Members may also do Gardening: pruning, planting, clearing leaves etc.. according to what they feel needs doing. Care must be taken not to dig up what someone else has planted. If you are planting seeds, plastic labels are helpful as reminders to people. These are found in the “Old Laundry room”. (Where the tools are kept).
7. Of course, members may feel that the garden is best appreciated by doing nothing and this is totally acceptable. There are various places throughout the garden to sit as well as a shed with windows for weather protection. There is bird seed in the “Old Laundry Room”, and feeding the birds can also be a good way of walking around the garden and noticing things.
8.There are some musical instruments which anyone is welcome to play. Art materials are only for use by the Bridges club and youth club. However if you want to use pencils, crayon, pen and paper that is fine. You are also welcome to bring your own art materials to use but remember to take them away when you leave unless they are intended for use by everyyone.
9. A donation of 50p is appreciated on each visit to cover the costs of drinks, birdseed and gas. There is a safe tin for donations in the fridge which is blue.The kettle is in the “Old Laundry room” on the table and teas and coffees are on top of the fridge.
10. There is a “Comments” book in the shed on the glass table. It is green. Please feel free to write or draw anything in here.
Thanks.
With best wishes,
Ruth
1. Members may book for weekly regular times-spaces in the morning or afternoon provided there is no clubs or other activities at that time Every two months this will be reviewed.
2. Members do not need to come for the full three and a half hours designated for the morning or afternoon slot. However they must come between these times, and not earlier or later.
3. When they leave they must ensure that everything they used is put away in the correct place. They must take away with them anything they have brought unless it is something that is intended for use in the garden by all members.
4. They can contribute to the space by making sculptures out of the bricks and wood found in the garden and can bring other material to the garden that they find along the way ( wooden furniture, bricks, plastic tubing, leaves, feathers etc ..) to be used in these sculptures. Members must use their judgement to ensure that what they bring to the garden is safe.
5. They can alter any sculptures or works that they find throughout the garden provided they respond and add to what is there already.
6. Members may also do Gardening: pruning, planting, clearing leaves etc.. according to what they feel needs doing. Care must be taken not to dig up what someone else has planted. If you are planting seeds, plastic labels are helpful as reminders to people. These are found in the “Old Laundry room”. (Where the tools are kept).
7. Of course, members may feel that the garden is best appreciated by doing nothing and this is totally acceptable. There are various places throughout the garden to sit as well as a shed with windows for weather protection. There is bird seed in the “Old Laundry Room”, and feeding the birds can also be a good way of walking around the garden and noticing things.
8.There are some musical instruments which anyone is welcome to play. Art materials are only for use by the Bridges club and youth club. However if you want to use pencils, crayon, pen and paper that is fine. You are also welcome to bring your own art materials to use but remember to take them away when you leave unless they are intended for use by everyyone.
9. A donation of 50p is appreciated on each visit to cover the costs of drinks, birdseed and gas. There is a safe tin for donations in the fridge which is blue.The kettle is in the “Old Laundry room” on the table and teas and coffees are on top of the fridge.
10. There is a “Comments” book in the shed on the glass table. It is green. Please feel free to write or draw anything in here.
Thanks.
With best wishes,
Ruth
To David Morris, Disability Advisor to Mayor of London
29.9.07
Dear David Morris,
I attended the “Politics Of Autism” Conference on Wed 12th Sept. I came up to the front desk where you were sitting at the beginning of the meeting and asked you about where to put leaflets- I don`t know if you remember this.
I finally decided to put the leaflets about our Self-Help Autistic and Dyslexic Garden Sculpture project next to the food at the other end of the hall.
I meant to give you a leaflet personaly but somehow didn`t.
_____
I worry about this project and the Community of people who have gathered over the last seven years through a Duty of Care, because the project will soon be closing.
It is a project that works in cycles; of laying down traces, revisiting and remembering. The involvement is active, practical and creative and in this way positive. It is a real space that we occupy, move around and have an impact on.
The theory and practice come together in this way, of how we involve ourselves, take responsibility and grow. There are problems sometimes- misunderstandings and tight spots- as well as moments, caught in glances, laughter and simple acts of hospitality, of real expansion. All these episodes are part of what it means to work things out in a community. This is part of the adaptaive shape of any group as it informs itself through time.
In this way, slowly, through our spatial projects where we make dwellings, shelters, pathways and through our Gardening projects, we come together out of our many diverse experiences.
After seven years of occupancy we face eviction. That eviction is now set for March 31st 2008. The land is owned by NCH and is a small annex to the side of their Highbury Site. I found it as a disused space and proposed the project which it has now grown to become. However neither me nor the other members could have known then quite what that would entail.
I have experienced a way of being through this project that I could not have imagined possible though perhaps it was lodged somewhere in my deepest memories where connections flow and are not interupted by an onslaught of images and words. Any place that sustains itself also sustains the lives that are a part of it. The meaning deepens over time.
I know from this project that people need to be “embedded” in a context where they have valued roles that are interdependant in order to live from their own life experiences. This is a crucial requirement for human Well-Being and tackles through engaged solutions rather than the naming of problems, what it means to have quality of life.
Many people with disabilites suffer the consequences of social isolation.
The consequent mental health problems which they may develop in later life then become the real issue and the disability an inadvertant trigger to these problems rather than simply another way of sensing the world that points to the true nature of human diversity and adaptation.
I think that people with a Spectrum Disorder- Autism, Dyslexia, ADHD- need places that they can make their own in order to draw on a sense of Community and to springboard themselves into other realms of action, thought and emotional Well-Being. Such places can act as “Holding Spaces” that build up positivity like a battery charger and through a series of deeply rooted valued associations, can infact address and prevent the day to day over-loading which is an imprisonement for so many people on the Spectrum. A support system of positive endorsements is crucial in re-diverting these everyday triggers to stress that otherwise isolate and negate people and allows unstead a different pattern to emerge; that of integration.
You are the Disability Advisor to the Mayor of London.
I would like you to ask the Mayor to take notice of the points I have raised in this letter and to make available- As a Matter of Urgency- spaces for disabled people and specifically for people with Spectrum Disorders, in which they can create their own initiatives and in this way address the real capacities that they hold within. I believe society will learn and gain back from such an endorsement and that this could have far-reaching affects.
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Founder and Co-ordinator of “Memory Gardens” Autistic Sculpture Project
Dear David Morris,
I attended the “Politics Of Autism” Conference on Wed 12th Sept. I came up to the front desk where you were sitting at the beginning of the meeting and asked you about where to put leaflets- I don`t know if you remember this.
I finally decided to put the leaflets about our Self-Help Autistic and Dyslexic Garden Sculpture project next to the food at the other end of the hall.
I meant to give you a leaflet personaly but somehow didn`t.
_____
I worry about this project and the Community of people who have gathered over the last seven years through a Duty of Care, because the project will soon be closing.
It is a project that works in cycles; of laying down traces, revisiting and remembering. The involvement is active, practical and creative and in this way positive. It is a real space that we occupy, move around and have an impact on.
The theory and practice come together in this way, of how we involve ourselves, take responsibility and grow. There are problems sometimes- misunderstandings and tight spots- as well as moments, caught in glances, laughter and simple acts of hospitality, of real expansion. All these episodes are part of what it means to work things out in a community. This is part of the adaptaive shape of any group as it informs itself through time.
In this way, slowly, through our spatial projects where we make dwellings, shelters, pathways and through our Gardening projects, we come together out of our many diverse experiences.
After seven years of occupancy we face eviction. That eviction is now set for March 31st 2008. The land is owned by NCH and is a small annex to the side of their Highbury Site. I found it as a disused space and proposed the project which it has now grown to become. However neither me nor the other members could have known then quite what that would entail.
I have experienced a way of being through this project that I could not have imagined possible though perhaps it was lodged somewhere in my deepest memories where connections flow and are not interupted by an onslaught of images and words. Any place that sustains itself also sustains the lives that are a part of it. The meaning deepens over time.
I know from this project that people need to be “embedded” in a context where they have valued roles that are interdependant in order to live from their own life experiences. This is a crucial requirement for human Well-Being and tackles through engaged solutions rather than the naming of problems, what it means to have quality of life.
Many people with disabilites suffer the consequences of social isolation.
The consequent mental health problems which they may develop in later life then become the real issue and the disability an inadvertant trigger to these problems rather than simply another way of sensing the world that points to the true nature of human diversity and adaptation.
I think that people with a Spectrum Disorder- Autism, Dyslexia, ADHD- need places that they can make their own in order to draw on a sense of Community and to springboard themselves into other realms of action, thought and emotional Well-Being. Such places can act as “Holding Spaces” that build up positivity like a battery charger and through a series of deeply rooted valued associations, can infact address and prevent the day to day over-loading which is an imprisonement for so many people on the Spectrum. A support system of positive endorsements is crucial in re-diverting these everyday triggers to stress that otherwise isolate and negate people and allows unstead a different pattern to emerge; that of integration.
You are the Disability Advisor to the Mayor of London.
I would like you to ask the Mayor to take notice of the points I have raised in this letter and to make available- As a Matter of Urgency- spaces for disabled people and specifically for people with Spectrum Disorders, in which they can create their own initiatives and in this way address the real capacities that they hold within. I believe society will learn and gain back from such an endorsement and that this could have far-reaching affects.
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Founder and Co-ordinator of “Memory Gardens” Autistic Sculpture Project
CHANGES TO THE GARDEN
9.1.2006
Dear Members/workers/volunteers,
The shape of the Garden is changing.
1. It will work more as a co-op with everyone having shared input and with equal benefits.
2. Everyone is entitled to a time-space in the Garden. This is a time to be at the Garden on your own. (See time-table in the shed for spaces still available.) This time-table changes every two months.
3. There is a volunteer gardening drop-in club every Tuesday. Anyone can come along to help with gardening, maintenance etc. And to drink tea.
4. Payment for services- youth club play-work, adult art club tutoring- will no longer be in money but in tokens.( Equivalent in value to the former rate of pay) These can be exchanged in a local health shop for food items and/or for health treatments- there is a clinic upstairs. In time, other shops and local services may come on board. This system will take affect, subject to the success of a grant application, in May.
5. Work tokens can also be used to hire time in the garden in order to run your own workshops, classes etc which you are qualified or have experience in teaching. (Yoga, Art, excercise, Qigong, etc.) You will advertise these for the local community. These must also be publicised in Autistic publications and at the adjoining Peter Bedford cafe.There must be a concessionary rate offered. All earnings for this will go to yourself. However if you need assistance, you are entitled to ask another member/worker and to agree a sum according to earnings.
6. Other artists/practitioners will be recruited to hire out space provided their Intended use is acceptable and of interest to members. Money raised in this way will go towards general necessities at the garden.
7. Gradualy our reliance on grants will be phased out and other aproaches to funding will be sought.
This will involve:
a) A schools programme.
b) A doner scheme where businesses can fund the involvement of either a child or adult with high support needs for a given length of time to attend a club or course or to have one to one tuition/mentoring.
8. Every three months there will be a meeting/bonfire at the garden where ideas about how the garden is going to be used will be discussed .
REASONS FOR THE CHANGES
1. The need to continuously make out grant applications is draining energy away from the fundamental purpose of the garden project. That is to provide a shared place for mutual support.
2. The last four grants have been unsuccessful. A sign that I am growing weary and so slack in this role; not really fully believing in it anymore.
3. Money is becoming the judge of worth and this is affecting relationships between those who get money and those who don`t at the garden.
4. A system of tokens enables many people to be recognised for effort in many different ways. The tokens can cut across difference where money highlights it.
5. Money is problematic in this project because not everyone can be self-employed and this puts payment on the wrong side of the present law.
6. Money seems to make people think in a narrow frame about the space. I.e it is a place to go for a certain amount of hours. It is hard for other ideas or connections to come about in this framework.
7. If on the other hand it is seen more as a shared space, then people who have an involvement with the garden as an Autistic learning space can still earn money by self-initiating projects from a wider basis of their own skills and drawing on a local paying community.
8. This type of inovation will naturally build links between the Autistic/educational aims of the space and a wider inclusive community. This will inevitably broaden perceptions.
9. I feel that it is no longer necessary or healthy for me to be the only person driving decisions and making things happen in this space.
10. After five years of intense involvement in founding this project, I am getting tired and need to open up the space and its possibilities as a place of dialogue between many types of people. Without this opening I feel that the Garden can not maintain momentum.
11. The Garden is the sum total of everyone`s ideas. I would like to see a more fluid and casual set-up where we support one anothers’ development by perhaps exchanging skills once a month- each month somebody different teaching others something that they enjoy doing. This need not be too formal. A swapping system of skills and interests that we are perhaps learning at the moment ourselves.
Exceptions to the token system:
1. A general co-ordinator responsible for the day-to-day running of the project, for
approaching businesses, for recruiting artists and practioners and making links with
organisations concerned with Autism will have a fixed monthly part-time wage and
must have a self-employed status. I will fill this post for an initial six months starting in May.
Before that I will continue to do it on a voluntary basis. After six months, anyone is able to apply for the post.
There will be a vote of all members to decide. This post will always depend on regular election.
2. People employed for specialist services- carpentry, plumbing, gardening- which
involve a specific job or for one-off training/artisitc development workshops for
members, have the option to be paid with a cheque if they are self-employed.
So these are the ideas for a few changes!
There is no compulsion in this new set-up to do more or less than is comfortable. Lifestyles change and are changeable and involvements reflect this.
There may be people who feel that the conditions of their involvement have dramatically shifted. – Especially those paid with money before who suddenly are not paid this way. Those who withdraw may need to earn money right now and that might be the priority. That is fair enough.
Whatever peoples’ situation, the space is there. Basically a free space to experiment with ways of living and to question certain beliefs about oneself and others.
Happy New Year!
Ruth
Dear Members/workers/volunteers,
The shape of the Garden is changing.
1. It will work more as a co-op with everyone having shared input and with equal benefits.
2. Everyone is entitled to a time-space in the Garden. This is a time to be at the Garden on your own. (See time-table in the shed for spaces still available.) This time-table changes every two months.
3. There is a volunteer gardening drop-in club every Tuesday. Anyone can come along to help with gardening, maintenance etc. And to drink tea.
4. Payment for services- youth club play-work, adult art club tutoring- will no longer be in money but in tokens.( Equivalent in value to the former rate of pay) These can be exchanged in a local health shop for food items and/or for health treatments- there is a clinic upstairs. In time, other shops and local services may come on board. This system will take affect, subject to the success of a grant application, in May.
5. Work tokens can also be used to hire time in the garden in order to run your own workshops, classes etc which you are qualified or have experience in teaching. (Yoga, Art, excercise, Qigong, etc.) You will advertise these for the local community. These must also be publicised in Autistic publications and at the adjoining Peter Bedford cafe.There must be a concessionary rate offered. All earnings for this will go to yourself. However if you need assistance, you are entitled to ask another member/worker and to agree a sum according to earnings.
6. Other artists/practitioners will be recruited to hire out space provided their Intended use is acceptable and of interest to members. Money raised in this way will go towards general necessities at the garden.
7. Gradualy our reliance on grants will be phased out and other aproaches to funding will be sought.
This will involve:
a) A schools programme.
b) A doner scheme where businesses can fund the involvement of either a child or adult with high support needs for a given length of time to attend a club or course or to have one to one tuition/mentoring.
8. Every three months there will be a meeting/bonfire at the garden where ideas about how the garden is going to be used will be discussed .
REASONS FOR THE CHANGES
1. The need to continuously make out grant applications is draining energy away from the fundamental purpose of the garden project. That is to provide a shared place for mutual support.
2. The last four grants have been unsuccessful. A sign that I am growing weary and so slack in this role; not really fully believing in it anymore.
3. Money is becoming the judge of worth and this is affecting relationships between those who get money and those who don`t at the garden.
4. A system of tokens enables many people to be recognised for effort in many different ways. The tokens can cut across difference where money highlights it.
5. Money is problematic in this project because not everyone can be self-employed and this puts payment on the wrong side of the present law.
6. Money seems to make people think in a narrow frame about the space. I.e it is a place to go for a certain amount of hours. It is hard for other ideas or connections to come about in this framework.
7. If on the other hand it is seen more as a shared space, then people who have an involvement with the garden as an Autistic learning space can still earn money by self-initiating projects from a wider basis of their own skills and drawing on a local paying community.
8. This type of inovation will naturally build links between the Autistic/educational aims of the space and a wider inclusive community. This will inevitably broaden perceptions.
9. I feel that it is no longer necessary or healthy for me to be the only person driving decisions and making things happen in this space.
10. After five years of intense involvement in founding this project, I am getting tired and need to open up the space and its possibilities as a place of dialogue between many types of people. Without this opening I feel that the Garden can not maintain momentum.
11. The Garden is the sum total of everyone`s ideas. I would like to see a more fluid and casual set-up where we support one anothers’ development by perhaps exchanging skills once a month- each month somebody different teaching others something that they enjoy doing. This need not be too formal. A swapping system of skills and interests that we are perhaps learning at the moment ourselves.
Exceptions to the token system:
1. A general co-ordinator responsible for the day-to-day running of the project, for
approaching businesses, for recruiting artists and practioners and making links with
organisations concerned with Autism will have a fixed monthly part-time wage and
must have a self-employed status. I will fill this post for an initial six months starting in May.
Before that I will continue to do it on a voluntary basis. After six months, anyone is able to apply for the post.
There will be a vote of all members to decide. This post will always depend on regular election.
2. People employed for specialist services- carpentry, plumbing, gardening- which
involve a specific job or for one-off training/artisitc development workshops for
members, have the option to be paid with a cheque if they are self-employed.
So these are the ideas for a few changes!
There is no compulsion in this new set-up to do more or less than is comfortable. Lifestyles change and are changeable and involvements reflect this.
There may be people who feel that the conditions of their involvement have dramatically shifted. – Especially those paid with money before who suddenly are not paid this way. Those who withdraw may need to earn money right now and that might be the priority. That is fair enough.
Whatever peoples’ situation, the space is there. Basically a free space to experiment with ways of living and to question certain beliefs about oneself and others.
Happy New Year!
Ruth
Reference for Becki
11.9.2008
To whom it may concern,
Becki Perriman is my most trusted and long-term worker at Memory Gardens Autistic youth club. I have every confidence in her and her ability to tune into the needs, concerns and interests of the children attending the club.
Becki takes a genuine pleasure in following, extending and supporting the experiences and choices of these children. She knows how to join them in their activity, affirming the details of their various interests, facilitating these by devising special spaces with whatever is to hand. She involves them for as long as their interest remains then switches into a different gear once they have moved on.
She is an excellent one-to-one worker which I feel is the area where her most unique skills lie. She can draw into a communicative space the most introverted of children simply by not making demands on them and allowing things to develop out of their actions. Children visibly relax around her leaning into the spaces she opens up.
Yet Becki is not a soft touch and will negotiate with and expect a certain attention and dialogue from children who are capable of this.
Becki may sometimes appear quiet or uncomfortable in meetings or on first arriving. However over the years I have come to realise that Becki works in a very direct and practical hands-on way and that where that connection is called for in the specific demands of the club she is one of the most pro-active and on-the-ground workers I have ever known.
She has a clear sense of what needs doing, of whom at that moment needs to be given some attention, and of possible problem areas where situations are beginning to boil up. At such times she is clear and coherent in expressing to other workers the needs as they unfold and can express and summarise well in meetings both these situations and observations of a more positive kind in relation to a certain child and some small yet special act of theirs. She has an ability to see through to the real issues concerning children which puts into a different framework acts that might otherwise seem unimportant.
Becki has a real feeling for the children she works with. She has a genuine sense of celebration and possibility in the way she relates to them. They sense her acceptance and quiet affirmation of who they are and this gives them the confidence to express themselves.
I would not hesitate in recommending Becki for this post.
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinator
Memory Gardens Autistic Sculpture Project
To whom it may concern,
Becki Perriman is my most trusted and long-term worker at Memory Gardens Autistic youth club. I have every confidence in her and her ability to tune into the needs, concerns and interests of the children attending the club.
Becki takes a genuine pleasure in following, extending and supporting the experiences and choices of these children. She knows how to join them in their activity, affirming the details of their various interests, facilitating these by devising special spaces with whatever is to hand. She involves them for as long as their interest remains then switches into a different gear once they have moved on.
She is an excellent one-to-one worker which I feel is the area where her most unique skills lie. She can draw into a communicative space the most introverted of children simply by not making demands on them and allowing things to develop out of their actions. Children visibly relax around her leaning into the spaces she opens up.
Yet Becki is not a soft touch and will negotiate with and expect a certain attention and dialogue from children who are capable of this.
Becki may sometimes appear quiet or uncomfortable in meetings or on first arriving. However over the years I have come to realise that Becki works in a very direct and practical hands-on way and that where that connection is called for in the specific demands of the club she is one of the most pro-active and on-the-ground workers I have ever known.
She has a clear sense of what needs doing, of whom at that moment needs to be given some attention, and of possible problem areas where situations are beginning to boil up. At such times she is clear and coherent in expressing to other workers the needs as they unfold and can express and summarise well in meetings both these situations and observations of a more positive kind in relation to a certain child and some small yet special act of theirs. She has an ability to see through to the real issues concerning children which puts into a different framework acts that might otherwise seem unimportant.
Becki has a real feeling for the children she works with. She has a genuine sense of celebration and possibility in the way she relates to them. They sense her acceptance and quiet affirmation of who they are and this gives them the confidence to express themselves.
I would not hesitate in recommending Becki for this post.
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinator
Memory Gardens Autistic Sculpture Project
User's group response to Tenancy agreement
Barbara Peacock
Director Of Children`s Services
NCH London Regional Office
22 Lucerne rd N5 1TZ
4.10.07
Dear Barbara,
Our Users Group met today at “Memory Gardens” to discuss my most recent meeting with you and Andrew Mchardy and to look over the Tenancy agreement which Andrew had emailed me.
Members feel that there is one crucial point which is not addressed in the tenancy and which therefore makes it hard for us to agree to this document. The document gives March 31st 2008 as a leave-date from the site for our group.
However members feel that a leave date should be contingent upon active plans that NCH has secured for re-development and should not simply be a date imposed which could then leave the land vacant with no active use aranged for the forseeable future.
Members of the Users Group realise that there is a real concern with NCH concerning our group and the potential difficulties that you see in connection with us occupying the land. We want to work with you and we respect your right to reclaim this land when the time comes for an active project. We have always acknowledged your gesture of hospitality in allowing us to develop this Autistic Youth and Adult service and although we are independent from you, we acknowledge common goals and orientations with regards to User led services and an emphasis on providing opportunities for people to develop skills that link them back into the Community.
I want to emphasise that our members are very clear that we do not want to create difficulty for NCH. What we would hope for is to have a fluid and responsive relationship whereby we all have our “ear to the ground” and as practical developments come to light- in your planning and options for the site and in our options for other sites- that we might all act and adjust even if this is at short notice. This would mean that we could maintain our “Duty of Care” or “Stewardship”, towards this space until such a time as it was needed by you for another active use.
We feel that there needs to be a certain amount of trust in this arangement. We are not going to insult your hospitality by laying claim to this land indefinitely. But what members can not comprehend and find disruptive to their sense of what is right, is having to vacate a space which then turns back into a state of dereliction. I can not emphasis enough how much this disturbs and upsets our members and everything that they have come to work towards and value through their participation in this garden project.
We hope that we can all find the resources to work together and realise a common objective through this period of transition. This period could be used as a way of developing an important link across the border that at times seems to separate us.
I believe that through our on-going discussions, which I have come to value, and through the other points of exchange now in place, that this is already happening. I see this as a good thing.
Again on behalf of my group and for myself included, I would like to acknowledge NCH for providing this site for us over the years and to say simply, Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinator “Memory Gardens” Autistic Project.
On behalf of the Members of “Memory Gardens” Users Group:
Margaret Schofield
Jamie Pike
Molly Porter
Eloina Alvarez
Adrian Whyatt
Becky Perriman
Ruth Solomon
Director Of Children`s Services
NCH London Regional Office
22 Lucerne rd N5 1TZ
4.10.07
Dear Barbara,
Our Users Group met today at “Memory Gardens” to discuss my most recent meeting with you and Andrew Mchardy and to look over the Tenancy agreement which Andrew had emailed me.
Members feel that there is one crucial point which is not addressed in the tenancy and which therefore makes it hard for us to agree to this document. The document gives March 31st 2008 as a leave-date from the site for our group.
However members feel that a leave date should be contingent upon active plans that NCH has secured for re-development and should not simply be a date imposed which could then leave the land vacant with no active use aranged for the forseeable future.
Members of the Users Group realise that there is a real concern with NCH concerning our group and the potential difficulties that you see in connection with us occupying the land. We want to work with you and we respect your right to reclaim this land when the time comes for an active project. We have always acknowledged your gesture of hospitality in allowing us to develop this Autistic Youth and Adult service and although we are independent from you, we acknowledge common goals and orientations with regards to User led services and an emphasis on providing opportunities for people to develop skills that link them back into the Community.
I want to emphasise that our members are very clear that we do not want to create difficulty for NCH. What we would hope for is to have a fluid and responsive relationship whereby we all have our “ear to the ground” and as practical developments come to light- in your planning and options for the site and in our options for other sites- that we might all act and adjust even if this is at short notice. This would mean that we could maintain our “Duty of Care” or “Stewardship”, towards this space until such a time as it was needed by you for another active use.
We feel that there needs to be a certain amount of trust in this arangement. We are not going to insult your hospitality by laying claim to this land indefinitely. But what members can not comprehend and find disruptive to their sense of what is right, is having to vacate a space which then turns back into a state of dereliction. I can not emphasis enough how much this disturbs and upsets our members and everything that they have come to work towards and value through their participation in this garden project.
We hope that we can all find the resources to work together and realise a common objective through this period of transition. This period could be used as a way of developing an important link across the border that at times seems to separate us.
I believe that through our on-going discussions, which I have come to value, and through the other points of exchange now in place, that this is already happening. I see this as a good thing.
Again on behalf of my group and for myself included, I would like to acknowledge NCH for providing this site for us over the years and to say simply, Thank you.
Sincerely,
Ruth Solomon
Co-ordinator “Memory Gardens” Autistic Project.
On behalf of the Members of “Memory Gardens” Users Group:
Margaret Schofield
Jamie Pike
Molly Porter
Eloina Alvarez
Adrian Whyatt
Becky Perriman
Ruth Solomon
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