£340,000 lottery grant to boost services for people with additional needs in South Tyneside

Vision & Hearing Support, in partnership with Bliss=Ability and Your Voice Counts, have been awarded £340,635 in funding from The National Lottery Community Fund.

The team at Vision & Hearing Support will use its share of the funding to deliver a new, collaborative project – named Community Voice – across South Tyneside and Gateshead.

Chief executive Sarah French said he innovative project is ‘designed to raise the confidence, knowledge and self-esteem of people who have learning disabilities, autism and people who are at risk of exclusion due to disability, sight loss or who are Deaf or hard of hearing’.

Sarah said: “Thanks to National Lottery players, this grant means that we can develop a collaborative approach to increasing access to community activities.

"By removing barriers, we aim to raise the voice of people who are Deaf, hard of Hearing, vision impaired, and those who are autistic, have a learning disability or are limited by a long-term condition.

"Working together, we hope to learn from each other to improve our services in the future. This will make a big difference to people’s lives.”

Mayor of South Tyneside, Councillor Pat Hay, and her Gateshead counterpart Councillor Dot Burnett, jointly launched the new National Lottery funding which will fund a team of experts through experience to support community-based networks to design and develop accessible and inclusive activities.

The project will start this summer and will support individuals to access services or establish new ones to meet specific needs.

The network will be supported by Community Voice Project Officers who will gather local information and help facilitate a network of volunteers and individuals. Working together the partnership aims to remove barriers to improve access to services for people who have mental or physical disabilities or sensory loss.

Councillor Anne Hetherington, Lead Member for Adults, Health and Wellbeing at South Tyneside Council, said: “We want everyone to live the life they want to. Having sensory loss or a disability shouldn’t be a barrier to this. This project will help people do all the activities they enjoy doing and will support us as a local authority to deliver on our priority of supporting older and more vulnerable communities.”