Our Work

The original Safety Net project, funded by the Department of Health ended in 2012, however the work of Safety Net is continuing through the Safety Net Train the Trainer Project

Rod Landman, Project Officer, with funding from the Home Office (CIF), Devon and Cornwall Police, Devon County Council and the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital, is carrying on his work raising awareness of hate crime and mate crime in Devon and Cornwall.

The aims of the Safety Net Train the Trainer project:

  • To continue to raise awareness of hate and mate crimes
  • To support people with learning disabilities to become trainers
  • To support them, once qualified, to put their new skills to work by working on a range of hate and mate crime related projects across Devon and Cornwall
  • To gain employment opportunities in training

Learning Disability Week 2012 Launch

This year’s Learning Disability Week’s theme was hate and mate crime, to coincide with this, Rod Landman and volunteers Patrick and Will staffed a stand in Green Lanes Shopping Centre, North Devon to collect signatures for a petition aimed at Police Crime Commissioning candidates. They also launched the new Train the Trainer project.

12 people Image: Safety Net Co-Trainerswith learning disabilities will be taking the City and Guilds Introduction to Training Skills Award (7300) training qualification. They will each be supported by their own co-learner. Once they are qualified trainers they will then work on hate and mate crime projects across Devon and Cornwall. There will be a Reference Group whose job it is to help them find more training work. The project is being run by the Coalition for Action on Learning Disability Hate Crime and managed by the Association for Real Change (ARC).

Safety Net in schools

We believe it is really important to spread awareness of the issues surrounding mate crime as early as possible. People with learning disabilities have the right to be respected and treated equally. Like every other person they have the right to have real, genuine friendships and not to be bullied, manipulated and used.

The Safety Net Schools’ project is about bullying, hate crime and anti-social behaviour. We will work with students in year 9, in schools in North Devon, to stop them picking on people with learning disabilities.  The project aims to work in different ways in different schools and see what works best.

Our future aims:

We really want the work of the Safety Net project to continue to raise awareness and do more to stop hate and mate crimes against people with learning disabilities.

We are trying to get funding so that we can:

  • do more work on internet hate and mate crime
  • support more people with learning disabilities to gain training qualifications
  • enable people with learning disabilities to gain research skills so that we can increase our knowledge of mate crime and continue to spread the word on being safe
  • contact hard to reach people to tell them about mate crime

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