Exciting new role managing our pan-London Deaf and Disabled People's Hate Crime Prevention Partnership and leading on peer evaluation.

As part of our work with local partners to raise awareness of Hate Crime and increasing support to address hate crime, our staff and volunteers took part in Hate Crime Awareness Week in October. We travelled around the borough with the police Reassurance Bus and some of their Safer Neighbourhood teams. We hung out with Victim Support and our CEO spoke at the launch of the week (you can read the full speech below). Thank you to everyone who took leaflets, stopped and talked to us, and to everyone who filled in our survey about how to support people to report hate crime.

We have had loads of contributions from our members and supporters this month talking about what independence means to them, and there are more opportunities for you to get involved too. We would also like to personally invite our supporters and members to our next Annual General Meeting on 30th October from 11am to 1pm at Vestry Hall. We are really looking forward to presenting our new 2018-23 strategy to you all, which has been developed with our members and supporters over the past year.

Merton Centre for Independent Living (Merton CIL) are doing some work with Clarion Housing Group (formerly Circle Housing) to support their disabled residents to speak up throughout the regeneration process of the Eastfields, High Path and Ravensbury Estates. Merton CIL are supporting Clarion to hear from and consider the needs of disabled residents throughout the process. This includes people from across the full spectrum of Disability and includes disabled community language speakers and Deaf British Sign Language (BSL) users.