Balancing Act project enters first research phase

Amaze is delighted to be a partner in Balancing Act, an international research project that aims to learn from experiences of effective community support for disabled people and their families. The five-year project is running across six different countries, with Amaze being the UK case study, and the first full research phase of the project has just begun.

Project leaders from Queens University Canada are training six parent carers from Brighton & Hove and East Sussex as research data collectors over three days in September – thanks to all those who applied in the summer. The trained parent researchers will then conduct semi-structured interviews with around 20 parent carers of children and young people with SEND who have accessed Amaze’s parent groups and befriending service (previously known as Face to Face). The service offers coffee mornings, wellbeing activities, events and one-to-one befriending in Brighton & Hove and East Sussex.

We are hoping to gather evidence of how peer support activity like this impacts families, how it can best be balanced with more formal support/statutory services, and to learn from other project partners in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mozambique and USA about their approaches.

There will be further updates on the project as it progresses, including, crucially, how we hope it will influence local, national and international policy. There’ll also be more opportunities to be involved. We are grateful to the 60+ parents who expressed an interest in joining the research as interviewers, we are sorry places were so limited.

Download this Balancing Act handout to find out more.