hi,
our group is very general, not really for any particular group ie mums, children etc. There would be about 40 people come on average on the 3rd monday every two months and different people come to speak. I would love to get more young people involved, but it seems hard to do this
Hi
I think that is very admirable of you. I think you will have problems getting more young people. It is hard to mix adults and childrens diabetes because of the differences really (in my view).
Where I used to live they have a very proactive support group. However it is mainly adults and mainly type 2 at that. A mum and son team joined the group and started running children's sides of things but it could never be mixed. If you had speakers relevant to children then the adults wouldn't go and the parents of the children could only go if one of them stayed home and babysat or they brought the kids which is not good on a school night. If the type 1 kiddies don't get their required sleep it has a knock on effect on levels.
The mother and son team finally realised this and started organising children only things, not often, but this worked much better.
So everyone, adult and child alike are members of the same group and if I remember rightly we had to pay ?3 per year or something (so guess it was DUK affiliated as they want our money - sorry very cynical about DUK) but there were two different groups.
Where I live now two mums started up a support group, infact we have a website which is just being sorted out. We meet the first Monday of each month at 4 pm until 5.00 pm. It was at one of their houses but there are too many of us now so we have got a school hall instead. We have just gone to Chessington with the group last Saturday. They have a parents pub evening once in a while. We go to the panto. We have educational speakers once in a while. I've been to two in the last year and a half. Infact I am the next speaker, they have asked me to do carb counting. This is unusual though, they normally get a proper person like John Davis from INPUT etc. This is normally at 7 pm for an hour so early enough for kiddies to go if necessary.
Don't forget you don't need to be affliated to DUK at all. We aren't. They asked us to but it was about about fund raising for them. We want to be a support group not a funding raising group for DUK. If we do get any funds ie someone did a barn dance for us, we used it to subsidise the panto.
Good luck, it is fantastic thing you are doing.
🙂
