• Where am I?
• Home »
• What we do »
• Participation and Involvement »
• Parliament

Parliament

Campaigning for change

Part of the work that VoiceAbility does is to campaign for a better, more equal life for people with mental health problems, learning difficulties and other disabilities. In order to achieve this we strive to raise awareness of the issues faced by individuals and campaign to put things right!

Our Parliaments do just this - campaign for the rights of people with learning difficulties across the country to live a full and equal life.

Our Cambridgeshire Adult Parliament was created first, with 35 MPs and 10 Cabinet Ministers with learning difficulties representing 1500 disabled people across the county.

We replicated this Adult Parliament in Cambridgeshire with young people and created our first Youth Parliament.

We found that the Youth Parliament was such a successful way to get the voices of young people in the area heard that the Department of Children, Schools and Families gave us a grant to add more Youth Parliaments across England.

We now run full Youth Parliaments in:

• Suffolk
• Cambridgeshire

Click on any of the links above to find out more about the parliaments in these areas.

Promote the Vote

An innovative website was created as part of the Promote the Vote project which ran from Jan 08-Dec 09. A team of young people with learning disabilities led workshops telling people with learning disabilities about voting and encouraging them to register to vote. It won a prestigious ‘Doing Access Differently’ award, one of RADAR’s People of the Year Human Rights awards 2009. 

The website uses ground-breaking techniques, particularly around the use of video to produce a website that is truly accessible to those with very limited literary skills. Take a look on www.promotethevote.co.uk

---

To read more about our involvement and participation work, you can view our full participation brochure below.  If you would like to download this brochure, choose 'download offline version' from the options dropdown menu.