Celebrating 10 years of Involve!
This month we celebrated the 10 year anniversary of our amazing inclusive night club. Rob, one of our founders, who leads on service delivery explained what the night means to guests and why it’s so important to us.
“We wanted to make this one extra special, so we booked some of the incredible talent we have in our SEN community to entertain us.
Nattalie James performed live - I work with Nat one to one and we do song writing and recording and a big part of that is performing live. Nat has performed live at the club a few times, but this was her first appearance at an Involve birthday party! She had an amazing time and was blown away by the response. It was really lovely.
We also welcomed Caged Arts, a band made up of musicians who are all on the autistic spectrum, who we’ve worked with them for a long time. The band was born from our original disability music drop-in and this was their first gig back after a break. It was fantastic to get them together in the studio again. Playing live is such a good form of therapy, focus and such a release for them. I was helping out on the cajon and it was an absolute joy to see them play again. They’ve also performed at the club night before, so guests knew their music and gave them brilliant reception.
Creating a safe space for people to come along to on a weekly basis, somewhere that’s safe, fun, welcoming and enjoyable – it means everything to us. It’s somewhere people can make friends, have relationships and just be themselves. To be able to facilitate that and be part of that makes us feel proud. I often get emotional at the special events because of the amount of joy and happiness that exudes from the room. It’s such an incredible thing and long may it continue.
We know how important Involve is to our guests. When covid hit, we realised just what a lifeline the club was. We heard firsthand how people struggled without it. We take it for granted – it’s part and parcel of what we do. But for the guys and girls who come along, this might be the only time they go out socially in the week, or get the opportunity to meet their friends. When you see them meeting their friends or when they come into the club and say hello, you can see how much it means to them to have this wonderful environment that’s full of love. We’re like one big family, we really, really are.
We started Involve 10 years ago because we could see there was a lack of provision in Basildon for an SEN club night. When we started we had about 12 attendees but now we regularly 50- 60 (plus their carers) so it’s very, very busy. Other people have also set up nights which is incredible for our community. In the future, we really want the club night to continue and we’d like to put on more events. But most importantly, it’s essential that it stays free because many of our guests simply wouldn’t be able to come otherwise.
We do it because we love seeing people happy. We want them to feel safe, we want them to feel loved.
We want our guests to feel part of something. That’s really important. We want them to feel part of a movement, part of a wider family, a wider network and I feel like we’ve really achieved that with the club night.”
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