Improving green spaces and increasing access to the outdoors

The project will improve Service User’s access to green spaces in the neighbourhoods where most of them live. Due to poverty & social exclusion most of them occupy terraced houses or flats without private gardens. Therefore, this grant is needed to develop easy & enjoyable ways for them to visit parks and greenspaces safely. Blind people can get lots of pleasure from touching, smelling, and listening to nature in green spaces.

We will invest the grant to make sure they know the best ways to travel to green spaces near where they live and how to find their way around them safely. We will arrange special events to explain the features of the green spaces that blind people can enjoy including bee banks, bird boxes, wild and cultivated flowers, trees & shallow water features. Events will take place over 12 months so participants can learn how green spaces change with the seasons. Also, several gardening workshops during which all participants will all receive a free window box to plant.

Birmingham City Council / Heart of England Community Foundation

We should like to provide an Information, Advice & Guidance service to visually impaired residents of Birmingham and their families using both English & several community languages. The focus of the project will be on helping Service Users to maximise the incomes that they and their families are entitled to from all sources during the ‘cost-of-living’ crisis. We have chosen to base the project at 3 Access Point’s at different locations spread across the City.

We know lots of Insight Society’s Service Users live in these neighbourhoods. This is mainly because low-cost housing is available there. The service we want to provide would be contactable by telephone and via social media. In addition, we expect to make between 8 and 10 client’s home visits per week.

Our expanded ‘cost-of-living’ IAG service will offer immediate support at the in-person delivery points and by telephone and social media. We will also offer clients ‘case work’ to help to resolve more complicated problems. These cases normally involve us writing letters, completing forms, and making telephone calls for Service Users. Most of them need to have correspondence they have received translated into their preferred language and then read to them as they don’t know Braille.

We delivered a very good project in partnership with the Smallwood Trust during the Covid-19 emergency in 2020 and 2021. A new project for 2023-2026 has been designed to help blind women understand the cost-of-living crisis and how to survive it.

A lot of advice will be provided in the Service User’s preferred languages. Insight Society will provide practical help to make visually impaired women more financially resilient during the Cost-of-Living Crisis. For example, by helping blind mothers with children know how to find a food-bank near where they live and get authorisation to use it. We would also be able to provide bilingual home energy advice to help visually impaired women to manage their bills and understand how ‘Smart Meters’ work.

Many of the visually impaired women we know suffer from poverty which means they can't afford personal essentials like sanitary wear. We will therefore provide them with these essentials free of charge with part of the grant we are applying for.