The Independent Living Project (ILP)has provided a range of services to support disabled people to share their expertise with each other and find their own solutions to common issues. These have included Enfield Wheelchair Users' Forum (EWUF), the Occupational Therapy Action Group (OTAG), the Parents Support Group and the Visual Impairment Sub Group. Due largely to improvements in service provision locally, the focus of ILP has shifted from supporting individuals to encouraging disabled people and groups to engage with local services and decision-making bodies. In addition to this, ILP continues to develop projects that innovate and feed into the evolution of Social Care, for example the Self-Directed Assessment project that looked at developing a self-assessment route into community equipment services. This is a really interesting time for ILP, as we make the transition to a new user-engagement approach to our work, and we welcome any thoughts or ideas you may have about how this could work.

Currently, ILP activities include:

• Facilitating the Visual Impairment Sub Group (part of the Physical Disabilities, Sensory Impairment and HIV/AIDS Partnership Board)
• Take Control (for young disabled people aged 16-25)
• Feeding in to the Transition Implementation Group (for young people moving into adult services)
• Feeding in to the Integrated Community Equipment Services Steering Group

In the future, we hope to:

• Further develop our work with young people
• Work more with Deaf and hearing-impaired people
• Set up a pan-impairment forum to be the main voice of engaged disabled people in Enfield
• Develop a means to capture the experiences of the thousands of people who access EDA services each year

If you would like to be involved in any of this, please do not hesitate to get in touch.