The DAVID Project came about after a member of People First Merseyside, David, became ill and sadly passed away.  As he had no family, the group quickly realised there were lots of practical issues with nobody to deal with them, David had not left any information about his wishes. After David’s death our members decided to do some work around planning for their own end of life choices. This led to the development of the DAVID project, named in his honour.

We don’t wrap people in cotton wool, we realised we need to speak about death and dying as we can’t protect people from the reality of life, so the DAVID project has worked to empower people with learning disabilities and those that support, them to start conversations.

The project has brought us so much confidence when making end of life plans and we wanted to share this with others through our resources. We have made our resource booklets accessible to people with learning disabilities so that they can understand death, make their own end of life plans and have conversations with their support system. We made these booklets ourselves; they were made by people with learning disabilities, for people with learning disabilities as well as others who may benefit from using our easy read resources! We made the booklets interactive by developing games that people are familiar with, like snakes and ladders and putting a death and dying twist on it. As we realise that we cannot shield people forever from death, we wanted people to feel safe and enjoy learning about this hard topic! We also made 5 films, we wrote the scripts and acted in these films ourselves. Now people can watch them and learn about death and dying in a comfortable way. We often show all our resources and films at our death cafes, but we are now excited to share our resources with everyone!

The 11 booklets and 4 short films can all be downloaded on our free resources page – www.peoplefirstmerseyside.co.uk/free-resources/

The longer Experiences of Grief film can be viewed on our YouTube – https://youtu.be/imj2IL5jpy0?si=kHHbRsW6N6OxqSMY