Surrey service users ‘Push for Action’ in Godalming

As the Policy and Participation Officer for the South East area, I have been working with the NAS Horizons service in Godalming for 7 months now. My mission was to introduce the joy of campaigning to the service users there; to help them realise what changes campaigning can achieve, not only within their local community but also within themselves.

After thinking about how autism affects their lives, the group decided they wanted to campaign to raise awareness of autism in general, and to increase the knowledge and understanding of autism amongst local people. The ultimate aim was to change the way people think about autism, to help them understand it, and to change people’s behaviour towards those who are on the autism spectrum.

The group soon decided to add their voices to the national Push for Action campaign and it proved a good way of raising awareness of autism more generally. Staff and service users had prepared for our ‘Push for Action’ campaign day by hanging up posters and information around the Horizons day service, and when I arrived, they were ready to get stuck into a whole host of activities.

We started the day with cake! We decorated cakes of all shapes and sizes with the Push for Action red button and slogan, and some service users decided to use the opportunity to create their own messages about autism in icing. Much restraint was shown during and hardly any cakes got eaten along the way. We then turned our attentions to blowing up Push for Action balloons and attaching them to sticks so we could hand them out to children and anyone else who might want one. One of our group, Rich, was pleased we had something to give out to people which would continue to raise awareness of the campaign even after they’d stopped to talk to us.

Members of the group had made their own autism awareness posters and Push for Action posters several weeks earlier, and the staff at Horizons went above and beyond their responsibilities to ensure everyone’s posters were professionally printed up. Armed with these and Push for Action information leaflets the service users visited shops up and down Godalming High Street, asking shopkeepers to support the campaign by putting up the posters in their shop windows. Hardly anyone turned them down, and when they did it was only because of company policies. Many shopkeepers wanted to know more and gave alternative options of leaving the Push for Action leaflets on the shop’s information stands. This overwhelmingly positive response from local businesses was undoubtedly down to the hard work and dedication the group had put into making their posters and because they took the time to explain what autism meant to them, and how it affected their everyday lives.

During some of the first campaign meetings I ran with the group at Horizons, several members told me about the discrimination they’d experienced because of their autism. Many found it hard at first, to talk to me, and in front of others, about the difficulties they’d faced, and it also took time for them to get to know me enough to share those experiences with me.

When someone is on the autism spectrum, it can take a little longer to build relationships and trust, and it also takes me time to learn the various ways different people on the spectrum prefer to communicate, and to get it right on my part. I cannot express therefore, how proud and privileged I felt to see these same group of people donning NAS t-shirts, identifying themselves as people with autism to absolute strangers, and talking to people they had never met before about how autism affects their lives. People with autism are best placed to deliver the core message of this campaign, which is that we need better support and services for adults with autism, and we need it now! The Horizons campaign group delivered that message loud and clear. They are the reason that the Push for Action campaign is essential, and why we have to keep telling the government to get the Review of the Adult Autism Strategy right.

As for me, I won’t be leaving it long until my next visit to Horizons for our next get together; we have plenty more awareness raising to do!

Anna Nicholson