2004 Opening the Orchard Centre
Throughout its history, the growth of KIDS has been built on parent power. A prime example of this was the opening of the £1 million Orchard Centre in Stourbridge, one of the charity’s regional centres in the West Midlands.
The Orchard Centre came about through the Orchard Parent Partnership, a group of concerned and highly motivated local families who came together in 1999 to campaign for better facilities for disabled children in the Dudley area. One of these parents, Madeline Cowley, is now a KIDS trustee.
Once the charity had agreed to support their plans, work began in earnest to convince local authorities that a regional centre based in Dudley could be a strategic asset to the county, delivering many of the services covered by their remit to disabled people.
Funding was eventually approved by the Big Lottery Fund on the understanding that KIDS would continue to develop services at the centre for at least five years with no change to its original remit. That deadline has now long passed and the centre continues to expand the range of services it provides and the areas it extends to, such as Sandwell and Worcestershire, to which KIDS provide inclusion and development services.
The centre, a hall used for play sessions such as wheelchair football, dance groups and summer play schemes, was opened in 2004 by local MP Deborah Shipley. The centre employs nine full-time and nine part-time staff who provide around 15 services ranging from two-hour play sessions to short break holidays, Portage and comprehensive family support. Many of these services have been designed with the child’s development in mind, so that rather than growing out of a particular service, a child simply grows into the next one. A good example of this is the Superplay service which is linked to Halesowen branch of the West Midlands Scouts. This not only provides valuable training to the helpers but also enables a whole generation of disabled children to experience an empowering and much-loved pastime from which they had been excluded in the past.
Today, the Orchard Centre provides around 13,000 services a year to the 180+ children who use it every week. In 2009, the centre received a Dudley Play award for their play strategy initiatives which encourage other organisations to provide more inclusive activities in their community. Perhaps most encouraging of all is the fact that the Orchard Parents Partnership still meets every six weeks to offer advice and support to the centre it worked so hard to create.
Find out more about KIDS services in the West Midlands here.
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