Our First Post!

Hello there!

Capacity2Change is an awareness campaign led by two final year students, Rachel Kidd and Patricia Kenny. We're studying at Trinity and UCD respectively and are both Equality Officers of our respective Young Fine Gael College Branches!

Our campaign aims at raising awareness of the failings of the current Lunacy Regulation Act (1871) and how the Capacity Bill (2013) aims to correct these faults and improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities. We also wish to collect the attitudes of people towards these laws, and collate them in a document which we hope to present at a future Young Fine Gael event. For more information on the campaign and these laws please see our "About Capacity2Change" page!

We decided to start a blog as we felt it would be an effective method of raising awareness of our campaign, and of the Capacity Bill. It would also allow those who are following the campaign to receive updates on our progress.

So far, this campaign has visited UCD Young Fine Gael (YFG), Trinity YFG, DCU YFG and Maynooth YFG. We aim to visit all Dublin college branches, and as many other branches around the country as we possibly can! As well as this we will be running focus groups with students of health sciences, social sciences and law within our respective universities. Finally, we hope to run seminars and Panel Discussions on these laws, which will create awareness outside of the target demographic (ie students in health science, social science and law).

This blog will  comprise of updates on our focus groups and events throughout the year. We will both be contributing articles, and hope that you will find them informative and interesting. In the next couple of days, we hope to summarise what we have done so far this semester!

If you have any questions or would like to get involved in our campaign, please contact us at YFGcapacity2change@gmail.com or just leave a comment below!

Thanks for reading!!

Patricia and Rachel xx

Here we are on route to present Capacity2Change at Maynooth YFG