Wales Regional Peer Support Group
This Peer Support Group provides a welcoming, safe and friendly opportunity for people to meet up to share experiences, tips and information.
We are pleased to invite you to join us for a special region-wide Wales Peer Support Group meeting where we are delighted to welcome our guest speaker, Owen Williams, Director at Wales Council of the Blind as well as introducing our new South Wales Local Peer Support Group facilitator Stuart Francis.
Owen Williams was appointed as the Director of Wales Council of the Blind (WCB) in 2012 and has over 30 years’ experience of working within the sight loss sector in Wales. Owen is the past Chair of Visionary and was a trustee for them for 9 years. Owen has Nystagmus and is partially sighted, and this enables him to bring a unique service-user perspective.
Owen Chairs the Wales Vision Forum, a forum comprising local, regional and national sight loss charities in Wales. He has a background in access technology and providing specialist assessments and advice including the provision of technical assessments through the Access to Work and Disability Student Allowance (DSA) schemes. Owen has also worked on several projects within health and social care, most recently highlighting the scarcity of Vision Rehabilitation Specialists in Wales. Owen is also the Chair of Welsh Government Patient Advisory Group on Optometry.
We will also be giving a warm welcome to our new Retina UK South Wales Local Peer Support Group volunteer facilitator, Stuart Francis.
Stuart has Retinitis Pigmentosa, diagnosed in 2002. A Chartered Accountant, he worked for KPMG and Motorola in the UK and the Far East, where he switched from working to volunteering. Now back in the UK, Stuart spends his time supporting his local sight loss charity, Sight Cymru, leading local V.I/blind tennis and bowls groups and is a Steering Group lead for their Widening Vision awareness project. A keen runner, Stuart is a member of Griffithstown Harriers and Cwmbran Easy Pacers. He is also a member of Promobility, a local pressure group raising awareness and support for people with all disabilities through projects such as Äbergavenny: Sight Friendly Town”.
Please come and join us for this online Wales regional meeting where we welcome and encourage you to have your say in how we move forward with growing our new peer group in South Wales and support our community living with inherited retinal dystrophies, as well as helping to identify where we can potentially create new groups across the rest of Wales.
We hope you can make it and look forward to seeing you there!
Venue
This meeting will be held online via Zoom.