Chair’s Report
Again this year the association have been very busy, in total we have responded to 56 enquiries, 21 have been from parents, 16 of these were concerning boys, 5 have been about girls, 12 enquiries from adults 8 male 4 female, 6 wanting assessments, 17 have been from organisation wanting information or looking for software.
These numbers do not include those contacts made direct to befrienders and other committee members, or the repeated contacts made with parents, adults and organisations throughout the support we offer after first contact is made. Also casual contacts made when people know who we are.
To start these are phone contacts, which often can last 5 minutes or over an hour depending how stressed a parent gets, seeing your child constantly distressed can leave parents feeling helpless.
Concerned about children, these I pass on to befrienders who contact parents then an appointment can be arranged in college at a befriending session or a venue that suits both parties. Parents can become very frustrated not knowing where to turn for help.
Adults who contact us sometimes just need someone to talk to a phone call is all that is needed, others want to meet another adult Dyslexic face 2 faces to help them understand their difficulty. Many are working and because of changes in their work now need to have qualification and find they are struggling with the paper work, having enough time to finish a task is always an issue. We can give them the information they need to get the appropriate help. Several go on to be assessed to support them when asking for the help they need when taking exams which can lead to promotions. Adults can have very low self-esteem and need to know we are there to support them.
We’ve had 16 calls from organisations,
- Cuedoc Occupational Health info/ leaflets to use in there training sessions
- Cumbria Police - awareness session for staff,
- South Lakes Council -information and help supporting adults and appropriate software
- Phoenix Centre Cleator Moor - help supporting adults
- West Cumbria Achievement Zone – help supporting young people
- Barrow College - help supporting adults and appropriate software
- Connexions - help supporting young people
- Social Services - help supporting young person
- News & Star- information for article
- JHP Training - help supporting young people also info/leaflets
- Chapel Head Medical Centre Keswick information and help supporting Clients
- GEN II - help supporting young people and appropriate software
- for online assessments
- College Tutors - Software demonstration
- We also have calls from Schools
- Impact
- BNFL
Enquires range from
- How can I help my child?
- What can I expect schools to do?
- Tribunals
- Explanation on how the system works
- Understanding Statements
- Information on Accesses to Work
- Training to work with Dyslexic’s
- Student’s entitlements
- Software: what is available and demonstrations
- Help with literacy and numeracy
- A listening ear
- Assessments for both Children and adults
The number wanting assessments is increasing; we can arrange these for any age group with a qualified assessor at a cost of £185, of which the association get £20 for the referral
The website WWW.WCDA.ORG.UK
Many of our contacts come through the website there have been over 6000 visits during the last year, with good feed back
From website analysis, we see many visits from automatic systems, such as Google and Yahoo. This is reflected in high ratings when doing searches in the web search engines. However there are many other places (than search engines) which refer to us, and we can see people arriving from
BDA
CFM Radio
SCUDA
And the Japanese Yahoo system with a translated page!
Most common pages visited:
There are thousands of visits to the index page (the front page) but looking at the pages within the site we see visits to:
Children’s checklist 863 sessions
Adult checklist 696 sessions
Adult support 743 sessions
Overview 845 sessions
Articles 899 sessions
Links pages 900 sessions
Befriending 698 sessions
Once the web page has been accessed these numbers shows the interest in all the information available.
Fund raising
Car boot raising £ 82.84
Soup kitchen St Nicolas’s raising £ 291.30
Sale of coloured rulers etc £15.41
Open Meeting
Dyslexia and vision, speaker from spec savers with colorimeter demonstration.
Helpful hints for dyslexics of all ages
Happy Secrets from Keswick
Kumon Maths
Learning Through Fun
Future events
Soup kitchen Feb 2009
Dyslexia awareness week Awareness / collection at Dunmail Park
Awareness Session for Cumbria Police
More open meetings/discussions to be arranged
The Business Plan is now complete and has been sent to several charitable organisations our success would enable us to employ a paid worker 12 hours a week, making the association more accessible in office hours
We have been lucky enough to enlist the help of Maria Lenney, a Community Involvement Worker based at Cleator Moor. Although Maria has worked relentlessly, we still have not secured funding to move the Association towards our ultimate aim. Sadly in these times of recession many other small organisations are looking for funding but we are not deterred. I and the committee would like to take this opportunity to thank Maria for her continued dedication to our cause.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the committee for all their hard work throughout the year and giving their time, without this we could not function.
I would also like to give a big thank you to Sandy for keeping our accounts in order and Ian for keeping the website up to date. Also the long suffering husbands, daughters, sons, grandchildren and friends that get dragged along to help on all our fund raising events
Thank You
Doris Pearce
Chair WCDA 
