Why our work?

Why our work?Living the life we want as chronically ill people

What is life with chronic illness like?

Long-term health conditions, also known as chronic illnesses, represent more than half of the world’s ‘burden of disease’. This includes headline grabbing illnesses that get attention and research funding, like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and HIV, but also less well known and often misunderstood illnesses, like fibromyalgia, myalgic encephalitis (ME), lupus, depression, and more. The ongoing global coronavirus pandemic has seen long COVID added to this list, with millions of people affected since 2020, and experiencing its debilitating effects every day.
 
Living with chronic illness can be very isolating. The pain, fatigue and the other symptoms we experience can stop us from living the life we want to. On top of that, we often face lack of understanding or even disbelief from our families, friends, employers, and healthcare providers. Our lives can become very narrow, and we can end up feeling very much alone, useless, and unsatisfied with life which in turn increases our stress and thus our symptoms.
 
Our own experiences of living with a variety of chronic illnesses has been that most support groups focus on symptoms and how to relieve them, or on general well-being activities; but we want support around how to get stuff done, create a joyful life, and make a contribution to family, community, and society, while living with chronic illnesses.
 
We Make The Path was begun to address that need.
 
We provide opportunities for chronically ill people to take the action they want to take, in a way that is sustainable for them, building confidence, skills, capacity and community along the way.
 
As well as individual benefits to mental, emotional, physical and social health and well-being, our goal is to see a ripple effect of improvement in the health and well-being of our participants' families, communities, and society at large.

Who we work with

Our core work is open to anyone with a chronic illness, whether its causes, symptoms or effects are physical, mental or emotional. We have a special focus on those who are unemployed, underemployed, or self-employed, and make our work open to people with low incomes at little or no cost.Themed projects remain focused on the experiences, wants, needs, and wisdom of chronically ill people, but are open to everyone.

Our approach

We seek always to operate in a way which is holistic, liberatory, and person-centred, encouraging people, individually and collectively, to generate practices for themselves which are nourishing and replenishing, and which enable them to be flexible and responsive in changing circumstances, which are often outside of their control.We work according to the following principles:Solidarity is fundamental. Until all of us are free, none of us is free.
All factors affect all other factors, all the time. Social, economic, environmental, political and personal are always interconnected.
Practice and theory are in constant relationship. Action generates reflection; reflection generates action.
The way we do things is as important as what we do. We can create the world we want in small ways now.
Each one of us matters, and we all deserve to be well resourced. Inner practice and inner healing play a core role in making working for change, at any level, sustainable beyond short-term actions.
Each of us can have a role in creating a better world. It doesn't matter what our skills and capacities are, or whether the work of change is at the most personal level or the most global. The basic requirement is willingness.
Relationships are key. Skilful relating is vital to creating lasting change.

Want to find out more?

Whether you want to find out about becoming a client,
how we can support your organisation and its people,
or how you can support our work, email us to let us know.

We Make The Path CIC Privacy Policy

Privacy Contact
-----------------------
Name: Elinor Predota
E-mail: elinor@elinorpredota.com

The type of personal information we collect

We currently collect and process the following information:
• Personal identifiers, contacts and characteristics (for example, name and contact details)
• Donations made
• Purchases made

How we get the personal information and why we have it

Most of the personal information we process is provided to us directly by you for one of the following reasons:
• You subscribe to receive notification of new blogposts
• You make a donation to the organisation
• You purchase something from the shop

We use the information that you have given us in order to provide you with information, services and/or products.
We may share this information with Strikingly and/or MailerLite for data processing purposes.

Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the lawful bases we rely on for processing this information are:
(a) Your consent. You are able to remove your consent at any time. You can do this by contacting darkly-sparkly@protonmail.com
(b) We have a contractual obligation -- e.g. to provide you with a purchased product or service.
(f) We have a legitimate interest -- e.g. you have expressed interest in our work.

How we store your personal information
Your information is securely stored on our behalf by Strikingly and/or MailerLite.
We keep your name and contact details until such time as you unsubscribe from our blog or mailing list. We will then dispose your information by deleting you from the databases held by Strikingly and/or MailerLite.

Your data protection rights

Under data protection law, you have rights including:
Your right of access - You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information.
Your right to rectification - You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete.
Your right to erasure - You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances.
Your right to restriction of processing - You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
Your right to object to processing - You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances.
Your right to data portability - You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances.
You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.

Please contact us at elinor@elinorpredota.com if you wish to make a request.

How to complain

If you have any concerns about our use of your personal information, you can make a complaint to us at elinor@elinorpredota.com
You can also complain to the ICO if you are unhappy with how we have used your data.

The ICO’s address:
Information Commissioner’s Office
Wycliffe House
Water Lane
Wilmslow
Cheshire
SK9 5AF
Helpline number: 0303 123 1113
ICO website: https://www.ico.org.uk

Living the life we want as chronically ill people

What is life with chronic illness like?

Who we work with

Our core work is open to anyone with a chronic illness, whether its causes, symptoms or effects are physical, mental or emotional. We have a special focus on those who are unemployed, underemployed, or self-employed, and make our work open to people with low incomes at little or no cost.

Themed projects remain focused on the experiences, wants, needs, and wisdom of chronically ill people, but are open to everyone.

Our approach

We work according to the following principles:

Solidarity is fundamental. Until all of us are free, none of us is free.

All factors affect all other factors, all the time. Social, economic, environmental, political and personal are always interconnected.

Practice and theory are in constant relationship. Action generates reflection; reflection generates action.

The way we do things is as important as what we do. We can create the world we want in small ways now.

Each one of us matters, and we all deserve to be well resourced. Inner practice and inner healing play a core role in making working for change, at any level, sustainable beyond short-term actions.

Each of us can have a role in creating a better world. It doesn't matter what our skills and capacities are, or whether the work of change is at the most personal level or the most global. The basic requirement is willingness.

Relationships are key. Skilful relating is vital to creating lasting change.

Want to find out more?

Whether you want to find out about becoming a client,how we can support your organisation and its people,or how you can support our work, email us to let us know.

Whether you want to find out about becoming a client,
how we can support your organisation and its people,
or how you can support our work, email us to let us know.