Pages

Eleanor Roosevelt, 1958

'Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home -- so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any map of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual person... Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerted citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world.' Eleanor Roosevelt, 1958

The Small Places has moved...

The Small Places has moved to a new home here, including all the old posts. Any posts after 6th March 2014 will appear on the new website, but old posts are preserved here so that URLs linking here continue to work. Please check out the new site.

Monday 29 April 2013

Today's legal capacity conference... in 100 (or so) tweets

If you couldn't make it to today's conference on Supported Decision-Making, organised by the Centre for Disability Law and Policy and Amnesty Ireland, then fear not!  For I live-tweeted the whole event in a twitter marathon and have 'storified' it so you can read it here without even needing to venture onto Twitter.  So, if you want to know what Gabor Gombos, Gerard Quinn, Cher Nicholson, Maths Jesperson, Rory Doody, Ignacio Campoy Cervera, Aiofe Day and Colm O'Gorman had to say about supported decision making, legal capacity and the Irish Law Reform process, then read on!  Amnesty will also be posting videos of the event on their website, here.

It was a brilliant day, really thought provoking.  I think the best thing about today was moving away from talking about problems towards discussing solutions.* I'm busy wondering how we can persuade some enterprising UK and/or Irish NGOs to set up a supported decision making pilot modelled on the South Australian project, or getting mental health teams to look into commissioning projects modelled on the hugely successful (and money saving...) Personal Ombudsman scheme...  Any thoughts?  If you want to read more about the amazing Personal Ombudsman scheme, I've just found a link to another presentation (doc) by Maths Jesperson which covers a lot of the same ground as today's talk.

*I don't mean the problems should be ignored, it's just that sometimes it feels as if this is the only conversation we are having, and we lose sight of the exciting work that is being done on supporting decision making.



No comments:

Post a Comment