What is Speak?

Speak is a peer advocacy service run by students at the National Star College (NSC). It aims to promote advocacy and empowerment throughout the UK.

Speak was born out of an idea that Richard Amos had when he was Advocacy Officer on the NSC Student Union and is supported by The Cleansheet Foundation which helps young adults start new lives with a 'Clean Sheet'.

The goal of Speak is to be the 'Voice from the Street' of young people with physical disabilities. The aims are to identify areas of need, challenge people?s ideas about disability and advocate for change. We are entering an exciting second year of growth and over the coming year we hope to move forward significantly to achieve these aims.

Speak currently has three areas of operation;

• Speak Peer Advocacy
  This service, currently focused on NSC students, enables people who have difficultly putting their point of view across to communicate through a trained advocate who will speak on their behalf to ensure that their needs and wishes are made known, views respected and rights protected.
  For more info What is advocacy?
  
• onlinespeak.co.uk
  This website is dedicated to becoming the best online resource for young people with disabilities. We plan to develop services to cater specifically for areas of need as identified by our online registration process which incorporates a questionnaire. Our website contains information about Speak, a growing database of links and a Blog to share information about issues that disabled people encounter. In future, the website will provide mystery shopping whereby users can feed back to businesses about how they can improve their services for people with disabilities. We are also planning to introduce a section where registered users can request, find and share information about accessible venues and services in their local area.
  
• Speak Advocacy Training
  Speak offers a range of specialist training to service users, parents, professionals and the public to raise awareness and to promote and celebrate advocacy and disabled people's involvement in running their own services.
  For more info see our Advocacy Training page.

Click here to read more about how Speak began.