Colm’s Story and The Growth of Reach Charity
This blog below is written by Colm Creamer, a trustee of Reach Charity, and he goes into how they’ve created a real community off of the back of their very successful How-Do-You-Do-It campaign. For the campaign, they created resource videos of showing how people with limb differences handle day-to-day life like tying shoelaces, putting their hair up, riding a bike and more. We hope you enjoy the read below.
As a young boy growing up in Ireland, I was a wanderer! Going off on adventures, taking a turn off that I wasn’t supposed to and generally driving my mother crazy when I wasn’t where she thought I was. After one of those misadventures, my grandmother said to me:
“If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far go together”
As a stubborn child, I brushed it off and ignored it, but the truth of this idiom really hit me while working with Reach over these last two years.
In 2023 a journey started in Reach to bring back and support our over 18 members. Those of us who had become adults and gained some life experience were very aware of two things:
We suffered from not having people in our lives we could connect with, who just understood what life with a limb difference was like and we didn’t want the next generation to fall into the same trap.
Reach could be the organisation that eased that suffering and enabled meaningful deep connections and friendships. The next generation could go far by helping each other grow up together.
The pilot retreat for 18-25-year-olds retreat in 2024, funded by The National Lottery, was a success with attendees and mentors alike sharing their thanks, saying they felt “Empowered, connected and much more confident”. One participant described it as:
Having this feedback, we knew this was the right idea and what was needed for the future of Reach. So, it was time to continue a journey that we knew wouldn’t be fast, but if we got it right, we would go far.
While the plans for the first 18-25 retreat were forming, an idea for a 2nd project started to take shape. What if we created resource videos on how to do those things people without a limb difference take for granted, tying shoelaces, putting your hair up, riding a bike etc? Even better - what if we celebrated doing those things our way? Thus, the “How-Do-You-Do-It” campaign was born, a series celebrating our differences and doing things our way. We posted the videos to Reach’s social media, one a day as part of “Limb Loss, Limb Difference Awareness Month (LLLDAM)”. With that, we had 30 videos that became useful resources for future generations. As a group, we had to try and go fast to meet that video-a-day deadline, but with that work and effort, we can support future generations to go far.
Fueled by how well the “How-Do-You-Do-It” campaign was received, an effort that our #LLLDAM partners thought was a triumph, and the success of the pilot 18-25 retreat; the group started on the next phase. We knew young adults still needed our support and as a result Reach needed to adapt in response to this need. We successfully petitioned our members, who unanimously voted to update our objects to support adults too. We needed to make sure we had a project that could sustainably support young adults with upper limb difference. We felt we needed to go beyond just a one-off event; we needed this to go annual! “Going far” didn’t just mean the working group going together; it meant including the current cohort of 18-25 members, lapsed Reach members who turned 18-25 and future people with upper limb differences who needed the same support which we knew we could provide.
Serendipitously, around this time we had a Reach parent, Nick Wilmhurst, contact us which unintentionally got us thinking of how we wanted to engage with our young adult community. Nick pitched to us the idea of starting a Reach podcast and after deeper conversations, a podcast pitched to young adults where they could benefit from hearing other people talk about issues around limb difference. Our team was growing with people of varying skill sets, so the journey was definitely going to be a far one. A notion that had us all excited, if a little nervous.
From those initial meetings, a larger conversation started gaining traction and the idea for the “Reaching Out” project bloomed. We had already decided that the 18-25 retreat had to happen, but that was a single annual event. We needed to connect with young adults throughout the year and, as an organisation, be available for them in ways they needed; using tools like our website, our social media etc – Reach needed to evolve! We had help and support in this too from talking with our partners in the #LLLDAM collective, who also saw the need to engage young adults and wanted a way to not only support us but to encourage collaboration together too.
Our plans got bigger when we started talking with members and partners who were already doing a lot of our existing work and we saw an opportunity. What if these skilled and insightful people, giving their time to the charity, could help nurture this generation of young people who may have interests in fields like social media management, conference presenting and digital design; but had no way to get a foot in the door - could Reach give them a boost in that journey? Could we help them go far in a vocational pathway? Thus, another strand of Reaching Out was born, and even better, with a way for this project to help sustain itself long-term.
We also began to look inward as a charity and make sure we were engaging with our communities in a way that allowed them to have a say in the direction we’re going, starting with the development of a Young Person’s Advisory Group; allowing young adults a chance to discuss issues that affect them and liaise with the trustee board on how they see actions. This was making sure that they had a say in the journey and could help us navigate its future.
With the increasing scale and distance of the Reaching Out journey, and knowing that all parts of it were necessary and important, the next question was how could we fund our huge ambitious project. The answer came from 2 sources.
First up, the VTCT foundation, who were very curious as to why we hadn’t historically done more together! The VTCT’s mission is to support people with visible differences - something Reach has been doing for close to 50 years! They were keen to look at the work we were doing with the 18-25 annual retreat and in January we got the amazing news that our bid with the VTCT foundation was successfully funded for the next 3 years. We can start holding annual retreats across England for young adults with upper limb difference, giving them a chance to connect, learn and grow or if they need it, just exist in a space with other people who know a bit about what they’re going through. Those young people will also be paired with an older mentor who has been where they are and knows a thing or two about their struggles. Those mentors will also receive training and support from Chantell at New Pasture Therapies (who has a limb difference herself) to better equip them to help others and maintain their mental health. During the 3 years, this project will be overseen, and insights will be given by a doctoral candidate at Durham University. With this research, we’ll be able to gain true insights into the mental well-being of people with upper limb difference and share our findings not just with the next group of Reach members but with other members and charities in the #LLLDAM community, helping future generations.
This April, we got the news that the rest of our project would be funded by The National Lottery Reaching Communities Fund. Their focus is on funding projects for communities and we are very grateful that they’re willing to help Reach and the limb-difference community to engage and grow with our young adults and enable them to flourish. Thanks to them, we can increase our social media presence, including but not limited to a podcast, and the insights and learnings from the podcast will be assessed by members of the Centre for Appearance Research (CAR) - allowing us to grow, learn and create something sustainable that will help us, and other charities in #LLLDAM. We will also be updating our website to allow more ways for members to engage with us. We’ll be starting plans for vocational programmes for young people and adding a Young Person’s Advisory Group to our charity structure, giving more members, more ways to engage and feel supported by Reach as a charity and a #LLLDAM partner.
Developing this project has been a lot of work and a long time coming. As we embark on it, I do so with excitement knowing that the amazing team which came together to achieve this growth and expansion for our community will find a way, united by our shared experiences and direction, to do ourselves and our members justice. With the help of the VTCT and The National Lottery, and by keeping a spirit of collaboration with our #LLLDAM partners, we will also be able to go fast, but I know that with this amazing group of people working together, we are definitely going far. We have a lot on the horizon that will take us farther than, as a wandering boy, I ever dreamed.
