Movement class: Nickel Support provides a wide range of activities at its base in Carshalton
CROYDON CHRONICLES: This week, DAVID MORGAN pays a visit to an organisation operating very much in the present, providing a future for dozens of young people
Upcycling: making old furniture fit for use is one of the first training tasks for those attending Nickel Support
It is rare that any of us don’t require some help to learn a new skill. Sometimes just watching will be enough. Often, though, we need to be talked through the process by someone who is proficient before practising it ourselves.
“Practice makes perfect” goes the old saying. But what if you are that person, who despite a multitude of attempts, still can’t master it? How soon before you just give up?
Imagine you are the parent of a child who struggles to master many of the basic skills of life. What is the future for young people who have been diagnosed with a learning difficulty?
One award-winning organisation, Nickel Support, exists to provide opportunities to those individuals and their families for whom learning skills have been a lifelong challenge.
Based in Carshalton and Cheam, Nickel Support offers a range of activities for participants from Sutton, Croydon, Merton and further afield.
One venture about which they are especially excited is their “Changing Perceptions” photography and art exhibition which opens at the Honeywood Museum in Carshalton on February 19. The free exhibition consists of professional portraits of adults taken by local photographer Yani Yordanova from Nova Photo Atelier.
As well as the photography, the exhibition contains prints and artwork which have been produced collaboratively between those from Nickel Support and local artists Kate Marsden and Jo Sharpe.
Shop window: Interestingly Different, on Beynon Road, stocks the produce and products made at Nickel Support next door
Many people, including Croydon residents, already donate to the organisation with gifts of furniture, to be used in regular upcycling sessions, where small groups of supervised adults set about the process of sanding down the items and redecorating them.
This is often one of the first activities those attending Nickel Support are given to do. Using sandpaper and brushes, the transformation begins. The tutors use this time to get to know each person as an individual. To begin with, communication isn’t always straightforward. It takes time to build confidence and trust, but it is the beginning of community building.
“Learn to look at the person behind the disability,” said my guide, “that is the challenge.”
The notion of togetherness permeates everything which Nickel Support does. As well as working together in groups, activities are held where parents and families can come and benefit from spending time with each other.
There are 140 adults, aged from 18 to 60, who take part in the weekly activities. Nickel Support’s headquarters on Beynon Road, just up the road from the Windsor Castle pub, is a special building. Purchased in 2007 with money from The James Trust, the four floors have full wheelchair accessibility.
The top floor contains the kitchen. On the day of my visit, they were busy preparing the ingredients for a winter chutney. Being involved in food preparation and being aware of hygiene, safety and dietary needs helps the young people attending Nickel Support’s classes, as well as their families.
Pickled pink: it is chutney-making time in the kitchen at Nickel Support
The finished produce from the kitchen, along with the upcycled furniture and other products, are sold in their next door shop, Interestingly Different. Staffed by trainees, under the supervision of tutors, the shop assistants are keen to display and to sell the products which the organisation has created.
The commercial side of their retail work is one that the managers hope to expand. They already have an online presence and hope to stock a wider range of goods.
One group contributing to this expanded range of goods was using jesmonite, an eco-friendly moulded resin, to make coasters, vases and plant pots.
Adults carrying rolled up mats was the clue to another Nickel Support activity. In the studio next to the shop is a dance and activity space. An excited group was just getting ready for a movement class.
Another venue for their activity is Whitehall, the historic house in Cheam. The café there, Beans and Bloom Coffee Shop, is run by Nickel Support to provide a place for adults with learning difficulties to learn to develop workplace skills.
This kind of success doesn’t happen overnight. The Nickel Support organisation has spent years working on its inclusion programme and looking for the right opportunities and venues to develop them.
They now have carefully prepared programmes where the focus is on each individual and helping them to achieve by acquiring new skills both individually and collectively.
David Morgan, pictured right, has been chronicling Croydon’s history for Inside Croydon for almost a decade. Morgan is a former Croydon headteacher, now the volunteer education officer at Croydon Minster, who offers tours or illustrated talks on the history around the Minster for local community groups
If you would like a group tour of Croydon Minster or want to book a school visit, then ring the Minster Office on 020 688 8104 or go to the website on www.croydonminster.org and use the contact page
Some previous articles by David Morgan:
- Palace winger Harrison’s Match of the Day at Croydon Minster
- All downhill for Odlings after they dismantled London Bridge
- The church fire that consumed a thousand years of history
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It is shameful that all of these activities and therapies, and many more, used to be provided by the NHS Trust [and many others] I worked for. Having emptied the learning disability and mental health hospitals into ”the community” and sold their sites [in the biggest land-grab since Henry VIII’s Reformation] while still providing such services to the former patients [now ”service users”] in therapy centres, the next move was to sell, gift or endow the homes the patients had been moved to and the care service that went with them to ”3rd party providers – housing associations, charities and businesses, ending all but the most acute, or skeletal respite NHS services, with the aim now of basing ”community care” on a single ”hub” in each local authority area. Services, training and therapies such as physiotherapy, cooking and domestic skills, literacy, art, woodworking, printing, etc etc were all closed, entire workshops full of machinery and equipment just skipped, and any such services largely limited to what could be provided in the individual homes, or by the stupidly underfunded and now almost totally collapsed LA social care services. So providers such as Nickel Support are doing a superb job for those that have been almost completely abandoned by the state.