Lockdown Lessons: 12 months on from COVID Lockdown.

It’s fair to say that excitement turned to outright fear very quickly. Not just because our income streams disappeared overnight, but how were we going to help our families if we couldn’t deliver our Pop Ups? Everything we planned was event and face-to-face-based, and so we went from a hive of activity to nothing. We had no money, no way to help our families, and no plan to get us through this.

We knew our parents were going through a hellish time, more so than many families because their children didn’t understand what was going on alongside the high level of care and sensory needs and a complete drop off of care and therapy in so many cases. We were desperate to support our families and needed to come up with a plan quickly.  It had taken years of market research and planning before we opened our first Pop Up and this has been key to our success, but Covid was something we couldn’t research and plan for, and so we reacted as quickly as possible in a way that made sense for us and for what we knew of our families at the time. With the benefit of hindsight, there are some things we would’ve done differently in our response to Covid, but overall we are extremely proud of what we have been able to achieve over the last 12 months.

How we responded to COVID-19:

1.     Online Resource Hub 

We started off by creating videos with ideas and tips for what to do at home with children and young people with disabilities, but to our surprise, this didn’t really get any traction and so we had our first pivot just a few weeks later. We started writing pages and pages of ideas and exercises for children with disabilities on our website.

We were trying to get feedback on what parents thought but it was very difficult to identify who was accessing our resources to get this feedback. We held parent focus groups and the general feedback was the website was difficult to negotiate and people didn’t have the time to be reading tonnes of text. We morphed our concept into an Online Resource Hub with focussed disability-specific play and exercise ideas and activities and changed the structure of the pages to make the content easier to access and navigate. It took a complete re-write and double the time it could have to get it right but it now has over 100 pages of content and accounts for 57% of all page views on our website with almost 9000 unique page views of our resource.  Lesson One learned in a big way – do the research BEFORE launching ahead!

We had been getting lots of feedback about how isolating it was for many parents. In some cases, parents were on their own with their disabled child with no contact with anyone even for a phone call. This was something we really wanted to try and tackle so we decided to set up a second new service.

2.     Therapy Webinars

We didn’t think just getting people together for a chat would work so thought if we could put a therapist and a specialist subject together (such as Down Syndrome and Physiotherapy) we could do some webinars and use that as a way to start conversations.

As a physiotherapist, I held the first few webinars, and I can tell you the joy and satisfaction from seeing families face-to-face again via zoom and to be actually able to know that we were making a really positive impact on these families was such an amazing feeling. The zoom calls had a maximum of four parents plus the therapist, so people felt able to really talk about their difficulties and get deep into how they could help their children at home.

Finally, we were getting the feedback and the response we had been looking for in March and April. It was a resounding success! The outcomes were not quite what we were initially looking for – it was more about what parents had learned and how the webinars had helped their child and family rather than helping with their isolation, but it was still more positive than we could have hoped for so we continued to grow the service. We had soon convinced some other wonderful therapists to volunteer their time to lead webinars for us and these had an equally positive effect. We ended up running 36 webinars with 196 parents. Our YouTube videos of the webinars have now been viewed 1600 times.

“In lockdown, my son became quite frustrated and bored, and I was struggling to find ways to entertain him. I was worried about the therapy he was missing, and I was running out of ideas. I took part in the free zoom session on Proprioception and it was a real lifeline at a challenging time. It helped me to understand my son’s frustration and consider ways I could provide the stimulation he was craving. It was inspiring and I learnt so much about the topic.”

But we knew we could still do more, and our families deserved more. As so often happens, it was a throw-away conversation about something completely different that ended up with our third new service.

3.     Lending Library

We had tons of Pop Up equipment just sitting in storage and we knew families were bored and needed ways to exercise and be stimulated at home. This developed into what is now our hugely popular equipment Lending Library! We took on a full-time member of staff – one of our previous Pop Up staff – to run it and she did a fantastic job with limited resources and very basic spreadsheets, telephone calls, and a lot of driving around the city. The library grew from 16 deliveries per month to our current record of 100 deliveries in a month. We launched a bespoke lending library website in October and it now has 150 items, 300 members (and growing fast), 8 delivery volunteers and we have delivered 500 items to our families for FREE for them to enjoy at home! We started collaborating much more closely with Bristol Council Disabled Children’s Team and other disability groups including Access Sport and Nova Sport to make sure we were reaching those in digital poverty or those who needed our services most desperately.

“It’s been a wonderful way to keep the kids amused – especially when our opportunities in the outside world are so limited. Kids have played TOGETHER with equipment (never happens!) Great to try out toys to see what our kids respond well to, might get them some bits for xmas having tried things out. Having access to this service makes everyone in our family smile, and it helps us feel “seen” and cared for, especially given we get limited support elsewhere. So grateful to Gympanzees for this – thank you!”

We also spent time improving our closed Facebook Group so families had another safe space to share ideas, information and be social and also launched our Friends of Gympanzees regular donor initiative in October.

With our funding streams disappearing overnight, and a new plan coming together for how we could help our families, we needed to secure funding to make it happen as we didn’t have enough in our reserves to cover it. We worked hard from the start of lockdown and focused on grants and have been successful in securing multiple grants to enable our Covid pivot and allow us to continue to deliver these services now for nearly 12 months. To all our funders, a HUGE heartfelt thank you from all of us and our families.

It’s fair to say we’ve learned a lot developing these services throughout lockdown. Looking back, it was hugely challenging and if we could have done it again, we would have taken more time to do more market research and work out exactly where the gaps were and how we could help. But somehow, we have muddled through based on passion, flexibility, understanding our audience, and making timely informed decisions based on the information we had at the time. We also learned the value of closer collaboration which we will embrace in our future work. Our Covid response has been so well received that these new services will continue to complement our core offer of the Pop Ups moving forwards. We have reached far more people than we thought, and feedback has been incredible.

I’ve heard it said that stress isn’t about how busy you are, it’s about how much control you have, and at the start of the pandemic the whole world lost control. We feel incredibly fortunate to have some of that control back and we know we’ve learned lessons that will serve us well into the future.