Stay Up Late brief Good for Nothing Brighton #summeroflove

1. www.stayuplate.org
Stay Up Late is a small national charity that promotes full and active social lives for
people with learning disabilities.
We believe that all people have a right to a full and active life.
Background
The charity grew out of the Stay Up Late campaign, which was launched in late 2006
by members of the punk band Heavy Load.
3 of the members of Heavy Load have learning disabilities and the band were
becoming increasingly frustrated at fans leaving their gigs at 9pm. Why were they
leaving? Because many support workers work inflexible shift patterns with evening
shifts typically ending at 10pm.
This meant that lots of people with learning disabilities were not being supported to
lead a full and active social life; the place where you can express yourselves, meet
friends and develop relationships.
The birth of Stay Up Late was also featured in the feature documentary movie ‘Heavy
Load’, which gave the band an audience through the BBC, cinemas, and US TV,
which enabled us to connect with a wide range of people all experiencing similar
issues and frustrations.
Stay Up Late’s origins are firmly rooted in music but the issue is much wider than
that. And we even agree with people going to bed early – as long as they are in
control of making the decisions about how they want to lead their lives!
Our main areas of work are:
- Advocacy – making people with learning disabilities aware of their rights and
the sort of support they should expect to receive.
- Campaigning – working with support providers and staff to help them think
about ways in which they can change their working practices.
- Influencing – working with commissioners of services to encourage the
commissioning of services that fully promote choice and a person centred
approach.
- Direct action – providing opportunities for people to Stay Up Late through
nights such as our pop-up club nights ‘Kiss My Disco’
Stay Up Late is currently a very small charity which is run by volunteers.
We’re committed to working on a very serious issue which we believe is fundamental
to human rights, however, we are not a ‘preachy’ organisation and try and do
everything with a sense of humour, and some sort of punk aesthetic!

2. The challenge for Good For Nothing:
The idea is simple. We know there are people out there with learning disabilities who
love music and would like to see more live music. However, there are obstacles
preventing this from happening:
- Community safety concerns (perceived and real)
- Possible lack of motivation and lack of confidence
- Not knowing what to see
- Needing a companion to go with
- Support around transport
So the idea is to match up people with learning disabilities with gig-goers without
disabilities who may be going to a gig anyway, the important part being that they
enjoy the same kind of music.
From this we hope that people can extend their social networks and form new
friendships with people that they may have found it difficult to meet otherwise.
The plan is to use the social capital that already exists (the gig going public) and
utilise parts of that to support people with disabilities.
It’s volunteering without trying, or as we like to say, it’s our vision for the Gig Society.
To set the scheme up we are fundraising (already with some success) to appoint a
part-time project worker and they will coordinate the volunteer part of the scheme.
However, we have also been researching how people with learning disabilities spend
their time and have discovered that there is a lack of accessible information to enable
people to make real choices about how they can spend their time. We therefore want
to develop something that will not only support the Gig Buddies with planning their
social lives but anyone else too.
1. The App.
We’re aware that all the tools exist online to facilitate social lives however they are
not particularly friendly for people with learning disabilities. We therefore need to
develop something that can scrape information from a variety of sources so that
choices can be made around dates, venues, genres, specific bands and similar
bands (like Pandora). There could also be an element of evaluating nights out and
communication between buddies.
Most importantly we need something that is very easy to use and doesn’t require
weeks of attending computer classes to work out. Ideally something that can be used
on a smart phone or tablet.
One of the most effective ways of making things accessible is not only to have clear
‘big buttons’ but also the use of video. Whether that’s to enable choices to be made
about potential bands but also to make short filmed evaluations of nights out.
2. Advertising the Gig Buddy scheme
The service will be most successful if we can grow an engaged user based of
promoters, venues and potential buddies. We need to promote the scheme and its
benefits to these people. How might we effectively do that and what tools should be
produced?

3. 3. Funding Stay Up Late
Creating a sustainable funding platform is core to our on-going success. We need to
create a short video pitch/advert to use for funding bids, either about Gig Buddies or
Stay Up Late and it’s other projects
Gathering evidence for the changes Stay Up Late has made and showing this in an
effective, engaging way.