Welcome to issue 39 of Sharing

Firstly hello!

Welcome to the 2022 winter edition of Sharing magazine. We’ve had an amazing year at Shared Lives Plus which has seen the organisation evolve in many ways. Sharing gives us an opportunity to reflect on this year and the changes we have seen throughout it.

It’s been a challenging year, following on the back of two years of lockdown and the pandemic, we have also seen cost of living increases as well as pressure on respite and pay for carers. In this issue we’ll address these issues again and also look to the future to see how we can overcome these difficulties collectively. Alongside advice we’ll also be sharing positive stories from throughout Shared Lives and discussing some of the plans we have to further support you.

This includes the renewal of our Invaluable pay campaign (see page 8), which aims to give you and your local scheme the guidance you both need to secure pay uplifts, working with local authorities who are facing even more severe pressures than the previous ten years, as I’m sure you’re aware.

We also give an update about Your Voice forums we have set up to help give members an opportunity to meet members of our senior management team and hear more about the work we do for you.

There’s considerable coverage of our UK conference which took place in October. It was a great opportunity to come together and discuss new ideas about how we can grow Shared Lives and Homeshare, and hear from Shared Lives carers and the people they support from across the UK.

You can catch up with their speeches on our Youtube channel. Search ‘Shared Lives Plus’ on Youtube. We also celebrated the work of all Shared Lives carers and announced the winners of this year's Shared Lives Plus awards. The fantastic work of our winners and highly commended members deserved to be recognised. They are representative of the great work being done within Shared Lives throughout the UK.

In September we welcomed the arrival of our new CEO Ewan King. In our last edition he briefly introduced himself. This time around we have a Q&A with Ewan which will let you get to know him a bit more personally and hear what he’s been up to in his first few months.

Ewan King, our new CEO

Our membership team have produced some helpful articles which provide guidance on the current cost-of-living crisis which can hopefully help answer some of your questions. We’ll also be checking in with our carer champions Helen and Steve to see what they’ve been up to recently.

We hope you enjoy this edition of Sharing Magazine. It’s always good to hear from you, so please do let us know what you think.

Lynne Harrison, Head of Membership Shared Lives Plus