Safeguarding Adults Week 2023 took place 20 – 24 November.
We host this week every year as an opportunity for organisations to come together to raise awareness of important safeguarding issues. Our aim is to start vital conversations and share best practice, so we can all be better together.
During Safeguarding Adults Week 2023, we focused on how you can prioritise the welfare and wellbeing of yourself and others. Each day of the week we explored a different safeguarding theme to consider how we might respond to various safeguarding challenges:
- Monday – What’s my role in safeguarding adults?
- Tuesday – Let’s start talking: Taking the lead on safeguarding in your organisation.
- Wednesday – Who cares for the carers? Secondary and vicarious trauma.
- Thursday – Adopting a trauma-informed approach to safeguarding adults.
- Friday – Listen, learn, lead: Co-production with experts by experience.
You can learn more about these themes in our short guide.
Seminars and Events
Throughout the week, we hosted a number of seminars, workshops, and other events.
Monday 20 November: ‘Who’s looking after the people looking after the people?’ Ian Braid led a session about how individuals can look after their own wellbeing when supporting others.
Monday 20 November: Ann Craft Trust Seminar and AGM. We were be joined by Open Door and The National Trust, who discussed how they’ve embedded safeguarding adults into their organisation.
Tuesday 21 November: Let’s Start Talking – Taking The Lead on Safer Cultures in Your Organisation. Ann Craft Trust Safeguarding Adults Manager Laura Thorpe set-out what makes a safer culture, and provided participants with the space to reflect on the culture within their organisation.
Friday 24 November, 10-11am: Developing Boccia England’s ‘Your Wellbeing Toolkit’. Boccia England discussed how they created their wellbeing toolkit. This was followed by a discussion about how to support the wellbeing of players, volunteers and staff in sport and activity organisations.
Looking After Yourself and Others – The 2023 Ann Craft Trust Safeguarding Adults Conference
We held our annual Safeguarding Adults Conference in Nottingham on 22 November.
There were two keynote sessions, one from wellbeing speaker Leanne Spencer and one from the Survivors Network. The conference also included a choice of workshops from Harmless, One Small Thing, and again from The Survivors Network.
Former International Rugby player Rhys Thomas also led a breathwork session, guiding attendees through a proven technique for releasing stress, tension, suppressed emotions and trauma from the body. You can listen to Rhys discussing his life and work in this episode of our Safeguarding Matters podcast.
We’ll provide full summaries of the conference’s various sessions and workshops in the January 2024 edition of our Safeguarding Bulletin.
A New Strategy For The Ann Craft Trust
We also used Safeguarding Adults Week to officially launch our new strategy for 2024 and beyond.
In our Strategic Plan, we outline our approach of how we will continue to create awareness and support people and organisations to improve working practices that will establish a greater understanding of safeguarding adults: as a charity, as a team, and as a trusted safeguarding partner.
Learn more about our new Strategic Plan here.
A Week of Activity in the Wider Safeguarding Community
While we ran our own events, the wider safeguarding community marked Safeguarding Adults Week in a number of ways.
On social media, we asked anyone who wanted to support the week to use the hashtag #SafeguardingAdultsWeek. In this way we could help promote any activity that took place to as wide an audience as possible.
Below is just a small selection of some of the activity that took place across the country.
You can get a bigger picture of the week’s activity by taking a look at the hashtag: #SafeguardingAdultsWeek.
A Massive Thank You
The enthusiastic response to this year’s Safeguarding Adults Week shows just how many people are committed to making a difference.
So no matter what you did to support Safeguarding Adults Week – whether you put on an event or simply shared some resources online – we’d like to say a massive thank you.
We’re already talking about our plans for Safeguarding Adults Week 2024.
We’d love to hear your thoughts. So let us know what sort of themes you’d like us to cover, and what sort of resources you’d like us to produce!