The pandemic has been a challenging time for everyone, but particularly for families with children with disabilities. For many, public play spaces were off-limits due to the risks of contracting Covid19, many support services have shut down and others are offering vastly reduced places due to Covid19 restrictions. This has left families feeling isolated and abandoned at a time when their children are experiencing greater need than ever before.

How we are supporting ELHAP families?

ELHAP's services re-opened in August 2020 after the first national lockdown. Our projects have been restricted in order to maintain the highest safety controls in order to stop infection transmissions at ELHAP. In addition to our main projects we are also delivering the ELHAP-Connects project:

What is the ELHAP-Connects project?

ELHAP started the ELHAP-Connects project as a response to the nationwide shutdown and then to the restricted reopening of local services.

This project helped to reduce isolation and connect families but also offered all our disabled and vulnerable children and young people opportunities to play adventurously, to have fun and to be active. 

The ELHAP-Connects project delivered 5 key tasks to nearly 300 ELHAP families:

 

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Online Workshops

We ran a wide range of exciting and online workshops each week, including Exploring ELHAP, Music Madness, Yoga, Mindfulness plus a weekly challenge. All our weekly online workshop schedules can be found at:

Online Workshop Schedules

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Play boxes delivered to families

We delivered 5 sets of 300 play and activity boxes to all our children and young people from Summer 2020. We continued to create and deliver these boxes until day-to-day life went back to normal. Each box contained a great range of toys, art and craft materials (we adjust the content for older young people).

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Group chats with young people

We organised regular and one off group chats so we can facilitate young people meeting up with each remotely and for ELHAP-Connects staff to check in and see how the young people are doing. We focussed on young people attending the Transition Studio, Pathway and Orchard Project.

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Checking in with families

In the lockdown, we organised a telephone check between ELHAP-Connects staff and ELHAP families so we could find out how each family was doing. It is especially important that we connected with our families and make sure that they didn't feel alone or that no one cared.

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Signposting families to extra help

We helped families find the support that they needed by signposting all the available services and organisations that were running in lockdown. 

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Support Us

Please support the ELHAP-Connects project. We urgently need donations and fundraising, so please check out our support page.

Further information

Please contact us if you have any questions or queries.