The two talks were given to citizens and professionals in Gloucstershire in December 2013. They explore how freedom and citizenship are for all - including people with severe disabilities and they set out the practical challenges of making citizenship real.

1. Making Freedom Real
Two talks for Gloucestershire

2. Freedom is important
•
Freedom is a fundamental human right
•
Freedom feels good - we enjoy free
•
Freedom is the key to other important rights tenancy, employer, property, sexual
•
People take us serious when we are free - with
respect
•
Freedom lets us change things - freedom
keeps us safe

3. Nadia’s freedom demands
•
People who listen
carefully and with love
•
Communication systems
•
The chance to live and
learn
•
Respect for her rights
•
Foundation in human
rights

5. Everybody can be free - but
sometimes you’ve really got
to work hard to make it real.
!
Wendy Perez

6. Freedom is for everyone:
1. Capacity - assume I can decide
2. Specificity - don’t generalise any incapacity
3. Selection - let me pick any representative
4. Suitability - find a suitable person
5. Best interest - pay attention to what matters
6. Involvement - I can still be involved
7. Review - things change

8. Freedom is social & complex
•
Patrick’s story
•
Michael’s story
•
Rachel’s story

9. How would our assistance
change if we took freedom
seriously?

10. “We are obliged to
surrender to the will of
the strong. Big
companies, cities and
municipalities decide
what is best for us. This
is about power. Why do
I feel a lack of power
in my own life?”
Sami Helle at European
Parliament, November 2013

11. How would society
change if we took
freedom seriously?

12. Any other questions?

13. Freedom
Aspiration vs Reality

14. We need humility
and the capacity
to work together
to find a better
way of respecting
each other and
living together
We only have
only just begun
to learn how to
undo the
damage done by
decades of
institutional care

15. At the end of the nineteenth and for
most of the twentieth century it was
common for people to think that
people with intellectual disabilities
and mental illness were very
different, hardly human, and
certainly not equal citizens.

16. The powerful eugenic
movement that spread across
Europe, America and the
British Empire led eventually to
the murder of over 250,000
people with disabilities or
mental illness in Nazi Germany.

19. The process of de-humanisation
that preceded the Holocaust
had seven steps:

21. But the journey away from the
institutions has been neither
straight nor fast.

23. This shows spending in one part of England after
the institutions were closed:

27. Often de-instutitionalisation
was an institution, without the park

28. Yet people keep breaking through
the barriers placed in front of them.
Social innovation by people with
disabilities, families and their allies
has changed the lives of many.

30. There is not just one kind of institution
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
!
we bring the institution with us

31. The creation of the welfare state
and social rights has helped lift
people from poverty and increased
the capacity for wider citizenship.
!
But today the welfare state and
social rights are also under attack.

33. In the UK we have seen a very
rapid unravelling of the
language of rights and
inclusion - back towards the
language of shame and
stigma.

35. Questions

36. It’s time to go back to basics.

37. What are we really trying to
achieve?
!
What works and must be
protected?
!
What needs to be challenged?

38. Q: What’s wrong with Hayley?
A: Absolutely nothing.

39. We must wake up to the
importance of community and
citizenship for all our sakes

40. But he who is unable to live in
society, or who has no need
because he is sufficient for
himself, must be a beast or a
god. He is no part of a state.
(Politics 1.2)
!
Aristotle

41. We must welcome human
diversity, and yet treat each
other as equals.

42. Aristotle explains that a community
is not made out of equals, but on
the contrary of people who are
different and unequal. The
community comes into being
through equalising,
'isathenai.' [Nich. Ethics 1133 a 14]
!
Hannah Arendt

45. Citizenship is the right goal

46. Being a citizen is better than
being ‘normal’
it brings us together as equals
but also as unique free
individuals
!
Equal and different

48. 1.What is lives - the with institutions?
Devalued wrong institution defines your place, your
role, your purpose.
2. No freedom or control - the institution strips you of
freedom and personal authority
3. Impoverishment - economic power is nullified
4. Sheltered, but homeless - a home is more than a roof it’s vital to control privacy and security
5. ‘Care’ not help - ‘care’ already assumes the passivity
and lower value of the person ‘in care’.
6. Disconnected - the institution cuts you off and leaves
you within a hierarchical system where abuse can
become natural
7. Loveless - relationships have no place in the institution

49. Why citizenship is safer
1. Direction - It’s risky if my life lacks meaning and value
2. Freedom - It’s risky if I cannot direct my life,
communicate or be listened to.
3. Money - It’s risky if I lack money or if I cannot control
my own money.
4. Home - It’s risky if I cannot control who I live with, my
home and my privacy.
5. Help - It’s risky if I’ve no one to help me and if I cannot
control who helps me.
6. Life - It’s risky if I am not a valued member of my
community.
7. Love - It’s risky to have no friends or family.

50. Citizenship is
also very
practical. We
can use the idea
of citizenship to
think about how
to help someone.

51. Citizenship
is possible
for everyone
it just might
take some
extra
thought

52. 1. Purpose

53. Demanding of man that he assumes his
condition and not till his neighbour's field, he
[Rebbe Yaakov-Yitzhak, The Seer of Lublin]
said: "There are many paths leading to
perfection; it is given to each of us to choose
our own, and by following it with great
dedication, we can make it become our truth,
our only truth."
Elie Wiesel

56. How is person-centred
planning?

57. 2. Freedom

58. I used to think that freedom was freedom of speech, freedom
of the press, freedom of conscience. But freedom needs to
include all of the lives of all of the people. Freedom is the
right to sow what you want. It's the right to make boots of
shoes, it's the right to bake bread from the grain you've sown
and to sell it or not to sell it as you choose. The same goes
for a locksmith or steelworker or an artist - freedom is the
right to live and work as you wish and not as you're ordered
to. But these days there's no freedom for anyone - whether
you write books, whether you sow grain or whether you make
boots.
Vassily Grossman

62. How is supported decisionmaking?

63. 3. Money

64. You could no more make a city out of paupers than out of
slaves.
Aristotle
!
Self-interest is the most powerful engine for individual and
social development, in other words, social progress, in other
words social justice. It is when the most disadvantaged in
society have the opportunity to improve their lives in their
own self-interest that change will take place.
Noel Pearson

68. How is self-directed
support?

69. 4. Home

70. Then the old Vainamoinen put this into words:
'Strange food goes down the wrong way
even in good lodging;
in his land a man's better at home loftier.
If only sweet God would grant
the kind creator allow
me to come to my own lands
the lands where I used to live!
Better in your own country
even water off your sole
than in a foreign country
honey from a golden bowl.'
!
The Kalevala

74. How is home ownership?

75. 5. Help

76. There are eight degrees of charity, one higher than the other.
The highest degree, exceeded by none, is that of the person
who assists a poor Jew by providing him with a gift or loan or
by accepting him into a business partnership or by helping
him find employment - in a word, by putting him where he
can dispense with other people's aid. With reference to such
aid, it is said, “You shall strengthen him, be he a stranger or a
settler, he shall live with you” (Lev. 25:35), which means
strengthen him in such manner that his falling into want is
prevented.
Maimonides

77. 4. Assist
5. Safeguard
Help
1. Discover gifts
& interests
3. Make
connections
© Simon Duffy & Wendy Perez 2012. All Rights Reserved.
2. Create
opportunity

80. How is personalised
support?

81. 6. Life

82. True love leads a man to fulfilment, not by drawing things to
himself but by forcing him to transcend himself and to be
something greater than himself. True spiritual love takes the
isolated individual, exacts from him labour, sacrifice, and the
gift of himself.
Thomas Merton

86. INFO
Give useful information
Connect to another individual or family
£
Refer to community organisations
Recommend appropriate providers

87. How is supported
employment?

88. 7. Love

89. Resources multiply in networks created by intentionally
building relationships that cross boundaries & serve
people's deepest purposes.
Seymour Sarason

93. How is love & marriage?

94. Citizenship is the full realisation of our
interdependence - the value we bring to
each other in all our differences.
!
The lame rides a horse
the maimed drives the herd
the deaf is brave in battle.
A man is better
blind than buried.
A dead man is deft at nothing.
!
From Viking - Havamal