This week, we were deeply saddened to hear that our friend Marie from Grampian Opportunities had passed away.
Marie was part of the Outside the Box family, contributing, participating and enthusiastically helping us develop and test ideas to support and encourage people and communities who want to change things for the better.
We first met Marie as part of the Getting There project, exploring how user led organisations and self- directed support could work together to support and enrich people’s lives. Marie travelled to Dundee from Aberdeenshire with Grampian Opportunities and participated in the sessions, at first saying little but always listening and gradually participating more and more. She used her lived experience to develop ‘Strike Out’, which is a programme of activities developed by Grampian Opportunities for people to get ready for self-directed support and for assessment sessions around for their care and support. The brilliant thing about ‘Strike Out’ is that it focuses on the individual and the things they want to do and achieve first and then on the support they might need to help them achieve their goals.
Marie continued to take on new experiences and challenges. By the end of the Getting There project she was speaking at conferences, talking about how she used and developed her own personalised care and support, and how this enabled her to live a good life, to contribute to her community and to help other people in many different ways.
Supporting and encouraging people with poor mental health was important to Marie. We worked together on a project called ‘Permission to Dream’ with the aim of encouraging and supporting people with poor mental health to dream about their future. Marie took on a ‘social reporter’ role at a Getting There conference in Edinburgh asking people about their dreams and collecting their responses.
We later developed this further by asking different groups of people across Scotland about their dreams. Marie, together with her friend Dawn Ranson, took a lead role and facilitated sessions in Kintore and Inveruie. They used graphic facilitation as a way of capturing and illustrating people’s views.
One of the dreams that emerged from the conversation was around people wanting to contribute to their communities and be part of groups and to do things.
One dreamer said, “I would like to be part of a group of people and do things.” This was like the Marie we knew, loved and worked with. She volunteered with Grampian Opportunities because she wanted to part of things, meet people, develop as a person and share her life and abilities with others.
We send our love and thoughts to Grampian Opportunities and Marie’s family and friends.
Reports and materials that Marie Johnston helped us with are:
Getting There and Permission to Dream
Getting There: What we did and the difference we made
Permission to Dream Report 2016