From Liz Olive, Hon. Sec. of Active 8

This is a small charity in Cornwall, established for teenagers with disabilities. We run twelve residential weekends a year, at an Outdoor Education Centre, for eight to ten young people. Each group stays together for two years. Active 8 has to be residential because of the distances involved, but they enjoy being away from home. It functions more like a youth club than a care setting.

In Cornwall, young people with major physical disabilities (except some who have a severe learning disability) go to mainstream secondary schools. Although this is good in general, they also live in a rural county. There are only 10 to 20 in the whole county in each year group. The effect is that they rarely meet other disabled people. They are dependent on parents for transport, and this often leads to dependence on parents to plan and make all decisions. They are isolated socially at an age where it's really important to be like everyone else; and often lonely. Other people's low expectations are a big additional disadvantage for these young people, who are aged 14 and 15 and are still finding out who they are. And we have no junior PHAB club, hardly any disability sport, no meeting points.

Active 8 introduces the young people to new activities and a whole lot of fun. Active 8's bias is to the most impaired, including life-limiting conditions: this can be a hard experience for the group. Careful risk assessments enable us to do challenging activities and leave no-one out. Some have been slow to trust us on this, from bitter experience. Canoeing, basketball, skating (in wheelchairs), surfing and archaeology are among the many things that have featured so far. In its second year our current group is starting Duke of Edinburgh's Award at Bronze level. They will need accommodation, personal care, accessible transport and good leadership to plan and achieve this.

Active 8 can increase the confidence of the young people who take part in it. They become more able to take responsibility, to support one another, and to plan and execute projects of their own. It widens their experience. They are able to get to know other young disabled people, and overcome fear of difference as they learn to trust and help each other. They relax, and enjoy not struggling to keep up with able-bodied people for once. They are able to make friends; also to fall out and make it up without adult intervention! After a year they are beginning to keep in touch between weekends by phone, and sometimes visit. We try hard to find disabled volunteers as leaders and role models.

Some of the group helped with a disability awareness training day for the Youth Service, which they did well and enjoyed. Since then, the Active 8 young people have decided they want us to help them design and facilitate their own disability awareness training workshops. A year ago they were all quite isolated and rather suspicious of other disabled people: now they have found a collective voice and feel they have a right to be heard.

If you want to know more about Active 8, or are doing something similar in another part of the country, please contact us through our website, www.active8online.org . And if you run a part-time residential project like ours, and are being asked by CSCI to register as a Children' Home at a crazy cost, we would like to share ideas about how to deal with that.