Alex Fox's Page

Profile Information

Organisation: NAAPS UK

Sector: care and support, charity

Background to your work: NAAPS is the UK network for family-based and small-scale ways of supporting adults. Our members are Shared Lives carers and workers, Homeshare programmes and micro-enterprises. We help our members to work together to survive, thrive and influence decision makers, providing support, training, events, resources, research and campaigning.

Alex is CEO of NAAPS (www.naaps.org.uk). His blog is at http://alexfoxblog.wordpress.com/ and he writes a monthly Community Care column. Alex sits on the Standing Commission on Carers and the National Programme Board for Think Local, Act Personal. Twitter: @AlexatNAAPS

Alex Fox's Blog

Myths, cynicism and personalisation

The personalisation of social care – the idea that everyone who is offered support should have maximum choice and control over their service and their life – is beset with some real problems. The biggest one being that making personalisation happen requires changes in services and budgets, at a time when councils are also cutting services and budgets. There have been articles in the trade press recently alleging that, surprise, surprise,…

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Posted on April 11, 2011 at 12:49

Pound shop provides recession-proof employment

People often say that it is much harder to achieve genuine employment for people with learning disabilities in times of recession and high unemployment. One Shared Lives carer has turned the recession to his advantage in setting up a recession-proof business which aims to provide real employment opportunities.

Mitch Morgan is an experienced market trader and entrepreneur who became a Shared Lives carer, supporting adults with learning disabilities in Shropshire. Mitch says, “I… Continue

Posted on April 1, 2011 at 12:30

Is it time for time banking?

Last week I was involved in some Cabinet Office-sponsored discussions about a time banking project being introduced to a local authority area. The idea is to introduce a system to incentivise people to provide low level, good neighbour type support. It would involve helping people to connect with each other and then turning people’s support into credits, which they could use to access council services or leisure activities. In the example that was worked through in the proposal, a young…