Dear Ally
This update comes to you from the ‘Working Group’ of The Dissociative Disorders Alliance (The DDA). We are a group of volunteers, currently people with lived experience of complex dissociative disorders. This group has been meeting regularly online every other month since the closure of a previous UK Charity (First Person Plural). To date the Working Group has been focusing on discussing and sharing out all the necessary tasks needed for getting The DDA established.
Our future board of Trustees are a mix of people with lived experience of complex dissociative disorders, practitioners and allies. This group has also met regularly online for the past year, and we held a face to face ‘Strategy Day’ in July. Coming together in this way really helped our future Trustees to fully connect as a group when undertaking the important work of pulling together strategy and plans for The DDA. The analysis of the hundreds of responses we received from you all to our questionnaire provided really useful insight to inform our discussion. Time was also taken to closely consider and address the feedback we received from The Charity Commission about our first application. The day was very productive with lots of healthy debate and discussion and resulted in a fresh application to The Charity Commission which was submitted in October.
As well as all the hard work that has been done for this fresh application, we have continued to focus on developing policies and procedures that are crucial to building a charity and community alliances that are safe, supportive, and fulfilling to be part of. There is plenty more happening over and above these formalities! We reached out to some of you who offered to volunteer and have begun to form some ‘Action Teams’ initially just in the areas that are needed to help get The DDA up and running, for example content creation and peer support. Don’t worry if you haven’t yet been contacted about a volunteering role, there are still action teams that have not got started yet that we hope some of you would like to get involved with. As well as there being plenty more future volunteering opportunities, we will also reach out to the community for help and ideas as things develop. For example when developing our brand identity; creating content for our website; undertaking Trustee recruitment and of course we will certainly let you know when we are in need of help with fundraising!
Please stay tuned for future communications. If you have received this update directly from us into your email inbox, it will be because you have already given us permission to add your name to our mailing list. If you have received it via other means and would like to be kept updated, please email us at: theddaglobal@gmail.com with permission to hold your details on file. Please also add our email address to your ‘safe senders’ list so that updates don’t drop into your spam folder.
Please join us in holding hope that this time round our application to The Charity Commission we will be successful!
Best wishes,
The DDA