Sturts Farm Community Trust
Sturts Community Trust is an exciting venture bringing together a range of social initiatives built around a vision of promoting sustainability. Their base on Sturts Farm, is a 90 acre working organic biodynamic farm on the outskirts of West Moors.
As a Camphill Community, Sturts Farm has, for well over 30 years, been offering land-based work opportunities, individualised support and supported living for adults who have a learning disability.
Sturts Farm Community Trust recently had a two day learn to lead training, Henning Koester, Sturts Farm Social Enterprise Manager tells us how they got involved and how it’s going so far:
The Learn to lead training was delivered to us at Sturts Community Trust by Phil Gibson and Susan Piers-Mantell in late November 2014. We were quite a large group of people and the training lasted two full days. Some of us had already had an initial taster the previous year by Phil and a few people had also managed to pay a visit to the Blue School where Learn to lead originally started and where it is very well set up and established.
The training was very inspiring and after some initial discussion it was decided to start implementing Learn to lead at SCT in January 2015. We formed 3 groups around the Farm, the Foodstore and the Creamery. The groups consist of 2-3 facilitators, people that have been on the Learn to lead course, 3-5 people with support needs and one observer.
Every group meets once a month and we have a monthly facilitators meeting. To get this right, it is very important to develop the skills required to become a good facilitator. Working with Learn to lead in settings with people with learning disabilities is asking for different skills than facilitating in ordinary schools so these meetings build on the skills learnt in training creating the confidence to be facilitating independently.
After only having had our first few gatherings now, the potential for supporting communication, taking responsibility and ownership is huge. The groups are diverse in every way and it’s exciting to see this unfold and develop. All sessions are observed and some bits get recorded or even filmed for review purposes. The reviews are especially important for the facilitators to reflect and learn.
It is nice to see how the people we support already after just a few sessions engage more freely and clearly communicate their ownership of the work they do. We have started using the sessions for the people we support to develop their own job descriptions by reflecting on the tasks they do. There is still quite a way to go to develop better and easier communication within the groups and this will help improve communication in other areas. The learning potential is great for people we support and facilitators alike.
www.SturtsCommunityTrust.org.uk
First workshop with the farmers about “Caring for the cows” the entire wall was filled by contributions from people we support in the farm environment
