WI Centennial Fair, a huge success

The WI Centennial Fair, which took place over the 3-6th September in Harrogate, was a huge success for all sorts of reasons. 

For RLO, it provided a fantastic opportunity to speak WI members and visitors about social care support – primarily for people with learning disabilities, to encourage awareness and sharing to wider networks (such as family members) – especially in terms of recruitment and to offer our services as speakers at WI meetings.

We can confidently say we spoke to over 2,000 people – total visitors to the fair were 13,380.  We were keen to talk about the work that we do, that we would like to speak at WI meetings and that there are opportunities to work with us.

The  people we spoke to were very positive about our work. One visitor in particular made a beeline to the RLO stand, to tell us how the support her brother receives has made a big difference to his life.

The feature of our stand was a large ‘Tic Tac Toe’ floor mat – with stools as playing pieces (see picture above). The mat drew great attention and provided some thrilling matches for those that played.  The mat now provides us with a fun resource that can be reused throughout RLO – for example at garden parties and other service events.  Have a chat with Kevin Bannerman, if you’d like to use it any of your RLO events.

A large TV screen provided a scrolling presentation about RLO services, which was a highly effective way of standing out from other exhibitors.

We partnered with Insane Logic and were supported over their 4 days by speech and language therapist Dot Reeves, who introduced visitors to the MyChoicePad software. 

The RLO team on the stand over the 4 days was Anthea Sully, Toni Fyfe, Wendy Lee, Kevin Bannerman, Brian Hutchinson, Lynn Hobbs and David Wilkin.