What happens when your community group gets involved in the Lost Woods project? Burnside Day Opportunities Hub tells all

The Lost Woods team has been working with Burnside Day Opportunities Hub, a vibrant service in Burgess Hill for adults with learning disabilities, for just over a year.

Burnside offers a variety of activities for the people it serves, both at the hub itself and around the local area. A typical week can include street dance and sports sessions, cookery, and art workshops, as well as groups that go out into the community, such as their Tidy Town litter picking group and their buddying group with local care homes to tackle loneliness. Burnside Hub’s programmes are wide-ranging so that there’s always something on that’s of interest to its service users.

The Hub is run by a dedicated team from West Sussex County Council, who pride themselves on ensuring that the programmes they offer enable adults with learning disabilities to be visible and included within the wider community.

The Burnside team wanted some support in offering nature-based activities, so the Community Development team at the Lost Woods project visited the hub to support some sessions and help organise visits to nearby nature reserves. Since then, Burnside has set up their own regular Nature and Conservation club.

Andy Hooley, Day Opportunities Assistant Manager, spoke to us about the centre and what the experience of working with the Lost Woods project has been like:

I’ll be honest with you, I've got the best job in the world. There are not many jobs where you come to work and people are genuinely pleased to see you. On a Tuesday morning when I’m in the hall teaching street dance, I think gosh I’m getting paid for this!

Historically, Burnside was called a ‘day centre’, it’s now known as an ‘opportunities hub’. This definitely more accurately reflects what we offer to our community here.  Every week we’ve got different things on both in the Hub but out in the community too. We don’t expect our users to come to everything that’s on, or stay in the centre all day. They pick and choose the workshops, groups and clubs that they’re actually interested in.

A lot of what we do is about representation. It’s about positioning people with disabilities in a positive way and challenging potential misconceptions or stereotypes. The only way you can do that is through visibility.

An ideal community is one that recognises everyone for their strengths and talents, like the Lost Woods project does. At a time when we were planning on running some new nature sessions, getting involved in the Lost Woods project was like a gift falling into our hands.

We didn’t want to set up a volunteer group only for people with disabilities - we wanted to be included with the conservation volunteer groups that are already established – because that’s true representation and inclusion. And the Lost Woods project helped us to do just that.

With the help of the team and especially Mark and Liz  - whose brilliant kind of positivity, energy and openness they put in to supporting us- we now have this absolutely thriving Nature and Conservation group. It will soon be one of our headline sessions.  Every Monday the group go out on a nature visit or help with conservation tasks, led by our support worker Jon Lane.

They join the other Friends of Markstakes Common volunteers to do tasks such as pulling up brambles and bracken to allow grasses and flowers to flourish. They’re also joining the Community Garden Gang at Macs Farm in Ditchling to help grow veg and share wellbeing there.

We have a duty of care - not only to our people to remind them how brilliant they are and that they should be accessing from the community like everyone else - but also to remind the community how lucky they are to have our people.

Another one of our sessions we do is called Buddy Outreach, and that's a group of people with learning disabilities who prepare and agree on activities such as quizzes, sing-alongs or bingo. Then in the afternoon they then go to an old people's home and they deliver these activities. So again, our people come away feeling rightfully proud of themselves. They’ve helped others.  

We tell them, you’re powerful, you're caring, you're passionate, and you can make a difference.

I couldn’t be more pleased with the Lost Woods support. I was talking to the managers and staff about how the Lost Woods team just understand community inclusion – and they position how people with learning disabilities are helpful to the community.

We like to highlight how great our people are. Let’s make sure they are noted in the community, that they are valued. And that the Burnside service is valued.

We’ve got Kangaroos and Young Carers coming in here, we’ve got an inclusive yoga group, the Men in Sheds group have a workshop here. We want to make sure that this building and the people in it are recognised and valued by the community, and that we’re open to helping everyone else too.

Invite Burnside’s Nature and Conservation group to your woods

The Burnside group is always keen to get out into the community to get involved in suitable activities happening on a Monday! Get in touch with Mark from the Lost Woods team if you'd like to invite them to your woods.

Get involved

If you run a community group or support underserved groups in our project area in Sussex, then you can get involved in the Lost Woods project. Contact us to find out more.

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