An important part of the Self-build Social Care project is reporting our findings, and whilst we are some way off this stage, we have started to plan how we are going to do this.

The members of the research team have recently submitted a number of papers to academic conferences in the fields of Disability Studies, Geography and Education, but we are also looking at ways we can feed back to relevant communities in our case study areas and elsewhere.

This was big topic for discussion when we recently held our latest advisory group meeting in one of the English case-study areas.  Alongside familiar members, we welcomed several new people who use and support learning disability groups in the local area.

We were keen to hear their views and ideas on our research outputs, and they gave us some valuable feedback which we shared with our colleagues at the University of Dundee and discussed in our follow up Research Team meeting.

We presented our plans to produce a promotional film in collaboration with some of our partner organisations in the case study areas. One of the advisory group members (an advocate) shared her experiences of working on a film-making project and gave us an insight into some of the challenges.

We also followed up a suggestion from one of the self-advocates to invite people with learning disabilities around the country to contribute short videos based on their experiences of ‘self-building’ which could be shared on our website and social media platforms.

We discussed the power and accessibility of the video medium, with many people now able to shoot and edit videos on their mobile phones. Another self-advocate told us about his positive experiences of making videos with a local organisation.

Many in the group thought the videos should represent positive and negative stories around self-building social care; the aspirations and achievements but also the challenges and barriers.

Several group members questioned whether ‘self-build’ and ‘social care’ are the best terms to use to prompt people to contribute and promote the videos, and a number of alternative hashtags were proposed. We will continue to think about these issues.

We also plan to run research feedback workshops in our case study areas and create resource packs, and the advisory group also provided some interesting thoughts on these.

Whilst we continue to develop our ideas on all our research outputs, we are busy completing our fieldwork and beginning the process of analysing our data, and in our next advisory group meeting it will be useful to report and get feedback on some of the key themes that are emerging.