Voice4ChangeEngland (V4CE) Co-Funded by Comic Relief

In 2020 Voice4Change England (V4CE) opened a Covid-19 grants programme for Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) community groups and organisations, working to deliver Covid-19 services in England and helping to tackle the disproportionate impact of Covid-19 on BAME communities. There were three possible sections to apply within: delivering Covid-19 services, mental health services and sports activities to tackle BAME inequalities. All grant awards were in the region of £5-10K. 881 applications were received from BAME led organisations of which 111 were approved including one from Insight Society.

For 6 months in the autumn of 2020 and the Spring of 2021 the project helped blind and severely visually impaired people (overwhelmingly BAME women) to recover from the adverse impact of Covid-19 on their medium to long term physical and mental health.

We gave priority to Service Users whose quality of life is being severely reduced by long-term cardiovascular, neurological, and muscular-skeleton conditions that need regular hospital treatment. Some of Insight Society’s Service Users needed our help to ‘catch up’ with the regular NHS care they were receiving before the Covid-19 lockdown. Others need our help to obtain new appointments and referrals to both specialist care and medical imaging (X-Ray, CT and MRI Scans). These procedures are especially challenging for BSVI people in general; and a terrifying prospect for women who are blind and don’t speak English as many of our Service Users don’t. Our trained volunteers supported and comforted them throughout the experience. For example, about 40 of the women who used the service suffered from diabetes which caused their sight to deteriorate even further. With our help, they re-start attending clinics because we made the appointments and arranged transport for them to the venues. Our staff and volunteers also helped them to administer their own Insulin and to understand the importance of eating a suitable diet to manage their diabetes. Our interventions added value to the NHS services they started to benefit from again after hospital services started to open-up.

We will also invested the grant to improve access to domiciliary home care provided by Local Authorities. In Birmingham and the Black Country, most of this is provided through a system known as ‘Direct Payments’. Under this, the Service User has to employ their own home care worker. We wanted to see this system extended but not abused so the Service Users all make informed decisions about who to employ of their own free will.  Insight Society wanted to stop a small number of them being intimidated into employing family members who don’t do enough work to justify their wages.