Empowerment Learning Group

in-house training seminar 2009

The empowerment concept is frequently part of the vocabulary of European Institutions, the disability movement, service providers and academics. Defining empowerment as the ‘ability to steer one’s own process’ clarifies that it is an absolute condition for putting in practice the principles of ‘user-involvement’ and ‘user-participation’ currently dominating the debate in the disability field. Moreover, experience has shown that empowered service-users that are able to make their own choices lead to higher success rates of rehabilitation.

For this reason EPR memebers in the Netherlands developed two EQUAL projects (VrijBaan and REQUEST) each one focusing on different empowerment perspectives. Implementing empowerment in service delivery to users asks for a specific two-pronged approach:

• attention needs to be paid to the individual empowerment of the service-user (VrijBaan)

• focus should be on the empowering qualities of the professional and his/her organisation (REQUEST)

To download the general programme of the Empowerment Learning Group, please click below

General Programme

First session on 17-18 April in Brussels

The first session of the learning group took place on 17 and 18 of April in Brussels. Professionals from 8 EPR centres met in the lovely Art Deco Quakers house to be trained on the use of the tool Vrijbaan. Frans Nijhuis and Annemarie Corjanus facilitated this session, and gave an overview of the empowerment concept, the scope of Vrijbaan, and the methodological instructions to use it with service users.

To download the relevant documentation of the Empowerment Learning Group, please login on EPR website and then click below

Programme meeting 1

Programme meeting 2

Programme meeting 3

DURAPART (Arendal) 21-23 September 2009

IR-RS (Ljubljana) 2-4 November 2009