Hi, welcome to my channel. I'm here with two very special guests today, Patty
Scott and Dave Hasbury who are here visiting from America. Patty and Dave are
a husband-and-wife team with a combined experience of over 60 years of working
with disabled people and working together with communities. Dave works
alongside Patty who is the CEO of Neighbours Inc and Neighbours
International. Neighbours International and Neighbours Inc support disabled
people to create a good life for themselves and to engage with their
communities around them. Patti and Dave have also written books have made films all
aimed at inspiring and educating everyone. I'm gonna be chatting to Patti
and Dave about how we as parents and carers of people who have the most
profound and complex disabilities; how we can support them to engage with the world around them,
find a place in the world, identify their gifts, and find a place in their local community
So stay tuned and we'll hear what Patti and Dave have got to say
So thank you so much Patti and Dave, for fitting me into your busy schedule while
you're here in Scotland. I really wanted to speak to you both because I
know you have such a vast amount of experience in this area of really
finding wonderful places for people that you work with in the world and the
communities and engage in them with the people around them. And that's something
that it's very personal to me too. And on a great day I can envisage a
wonderful life for my son where he'll have some kind of work, he'll have a
purpose when he wakes up in the morning. And then on not such good days I find
that a bit more challenging, and so I'm actually hoping for me personally this
is going to be a really exciting conversation. I wanted to start off
actually with a quote which I believe comes from your website which is that
"healthy communities make room for the full participation and contributions
from all of its members". Why do you think it's important for both the community
and the individual that we have that kind of relationship? Well I mean if we
think historically, that's how we survived. Everybody had to find a way to
contribute to the whole, and you know in times when we didn't have all the stuff
that makes it easy for life to go on we really got by, by making sure that we
took care of each other because I was our only survival mechanism. So I think
it's built into who we are as people that we need to have that kind of
contribution. And it just seems silly actually to design things in ways where
contribution is left out. So the idea that a healthy community is one that
actually brings all of what's possible together; I think that's what health is.
Health is kind of everything working together and taking care of the
parts that don't work as well so that they can add what they have to offer.
And there's so many of us who have hidden gifts or things that aren't
easily evident and if we don't find those and find what people actually have
to offer and to share, we don't have as much available and possible in
our communities. So often there's things in people that other people don't
see, but once they see them, once we create a space where all of that can be
seen and appreciated and identified as a gift that it is, we have more to offer
each other in the communities in which we live. And community I think is a,
I want to come on to defining gifts in a minute, but community as well which is a
word that we're using a lot here, what does community mean to you, does it mean
a small thing, a big thing? What is community? Well to me a big part of it is
the sense of the people in the space that you're in, so it could be big or
small. It could be your neighbourhood, it could be your block, it could be you know
just the the people in the the general area of where you are, or it could be
larger, it could be you know a larger area and more people engaged. But to me
it's people who come together who share some common interests who care about the
space where they're at, who care about the people who live there who want a
good life for for everyone, and who support each other to achieve that. So to
me that feeling of community, it's almost like that
the idea of the Beloved Community, that you know came out of that kind
of thinking about a community that's for for all, and supports all. So that
makes me think as well, one could describe a community as a special
community, where we have just lots of disabled people all living together who
are sharing a space, but that's not where we want to go know is it? No, and I guess that's
not what I'm thinking of. I'm thinking of a place where there's diversity of
cultures and economic status and religions and
backgrounds and age and gifts and you know people kind of coming together
where everybody who's there can share. But no, and you know the
disability communities that you're describing, they're typically developed
by a system, a social service system or some kind of system of that kind. They're
not organically grown communities of people coming together because that's
where they choose to live or that's where they were born into, so so to me
that's a different kind of thing is as well. They are oftentimes places created
to segregate people. And sometimes places created for the very best of reasons
that still wind up segregating people, and that's not, that's not in the
spirit of how I feel community. We're also talking about gifts, and I wonder
whether gifts needs rebranding or redefining because to a lot of people a
gift would be that you're a great violin player or you're academically gifted, but
we need to think about this in a broader sense don't we to try and encapsulate
some of the people that we're trying to support. How can we define gifts in a
better way? I think gifts have something to do with
who we are. And obviously we grow and develop so that grows and develops as
well, but it's, and it's something that is exchanged in contribution to someone
else. Someone else receives something. I mean if you think about gift it is a
it's an exchange kind of thing. Often I think that it's not a gift until it is
exchanged, so because then it's something it's something of value that sits off by
itself. But it's this this notion that there's something that is valuable in
itself and that others experience that value. That others have a sense of what
that experience is and it's actually difficult to speak of in abstract terms,
it actually makes more sense when you actually see it, and you can tell.
And almost every parent knows the gift of a child because and all of those
children are different, if you have more than one child you know this is the gift
that this child brings, and this is the gift that this child brings, and this is
the gift. And I think it's in the experience and the stories. And I'll just
tell you a brief story. A young boy named John David, was of the age of a child
in grade 8, and he had some pretty significant cerebral palsy and so much
so that he would fall a lot when he was walking and so you would have to wear
helmet. And he'd never been to school before in the mainstream system of
education. And the school was starting to welcome him into the school and it was a
new experience. And he just had this incredible smile and this incredible
presence like you could feel John David's spirit in the way he spent his
days. There was yet another young boy named Michael who lived, who was in the
class. And Michael had difficulty with his family, so his family, his parents
were divorced and every time he went away on a weekend with one of his
parents he would return in just an awful space. He was really upset and you could
tell. And after John David was in the class for a while what the teacher
started to notice was Michael starting to navigate towards spending time with
John David on Mondays. And the kind of shift that was happening from the
experience that they had together and he kind of picked up on John David's spirit
and it actually grounded him. It was like clearly there was something about John
David that actually gave something to Michael, and Michael then was able to
find himself and that thing. Does that make sense? Yeah it does absolutely and
that's, and it's great to have tangible examples like that. Because as a
parent, you're absolutely right you get a sense of what your individual
children bring to the party but because we have this notion of
of that a gift has to be something more cerebral, something more you know
tangible, which actually maybe we should really be calling them skills, it can be
difficult to see those gifts and imagine how they could be a purpose to somebody
else. So that is a great example of how just the most simple thing of joy. And it wasn't
just a gift to Michael it was actually a gift to the classroom, because Michael
would have been disturbing what was going on for the whole, because he was
upset. The other thing that we've noticed is that it
often depends where the gift is shared. Because if you share a gift in the right
place it can be a wonderful thing. And if you're in the wrong place it doesn't
mean it's not still a wonderful gift it just means you're not in the right
place. So there's someone that I used to know, when we worked for her for
quite a while, her name is Joy. And Joy, she had tremendous energy; she didn't use
a lot of words ,but every time she saw you she would give you a big hug, she'd
remember your name, and she'd say hello I've missed you. And we were trying,
when Joy moved out of the institution, we were trying to find the right place for her
to share that, cause it made us feel good every time we saw her. And the first
place we tried was a hospital where she pushed the book cart around and brought
it to patients, and she'd go in and she'd remember their names, and she'd give them
a hug and she'd be happy to see them. And we thought she was cheering people
up and it turned out she was tiring people out, because these are people who
just had surgery. But we tried the gift in several other places as well and
eventually she wound up volunteering at a soup kitchen. And people would come
through the door, people who are down on their luck living on the streets, living
in the shelter, separated from their family. She knew everybody's name, she put
down her spoon where she was dishing up the soup and run over to the, or the food
whatever they had that day, and run over to the door and throw her arms around
them and say, Joe I missed you, how are you, I'm happy
to see you and it would make people's day. And you know she volunteered there
for all of her life. She was a volunteer of the year, and she made a real
difference. But it's because that was the place for her to share that gift. So a
part of it is figuring out, in the hospital that's disruptive, in the soup
kitchen that's a tremendous gift to people. So
part of it is identifying things that are potentially gifts that you might not
see as gifts in a different setting, and then part of it is finding the right
place where people can express that gift and where it's needed and wanted and
where it makes a difference.
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