On 14th November Darron Mcaul and Jim Burns came 3rd in the Doubles competition at British Blind Sports 10 pin bowling finals held in Sheffield.
Alex Ditch was also awarded a trophy for the most improved male player. Congratulations to all involved!
The Bowling Teams now meet at Washington Hollywood Bowling Alley.
Anyone interested can telephone Annmarie Dunlavey on 07455905925 for more details.
All are welcome.
Help Shape Accessible Stop Smoking Support in Sunderland
The Sunderland Specialist Stop Smoking Service, delivered by ABL Health, is launching an exciting new project to develop smoking cessation resources that are truly accessible and meaningful for people with sensory impairments.
Starting from a blank page and involving people with lived experience, we aim to design resources that genuinely reflect your needs, preferences, and experiences.
In Sunderland, around 27,727 adults smoke. Based on local estimates, around 600 smokers may also be living with a hearing impairment, and around 800 with sight loss. This highlights how important it is to make sure our stop smoking support reaches everyone in an inclusive and accessible way.
We already offer a free 12-week support programme, including Nicotine Replacement Therapy (NRT) and vapes to help people quit. This project will focus on creating new materials and approaches with you, not for you.
Join our Co-Production Group
We’re inviting people who smoke and have a sensory impairment (Deaf, hard of hearing, blind, or visually impaired) to join a friendly co-production group at the end of November (date and venue are yet to be confirmed).
The session will:
• Last no longer than 90 minutes
• Include refreshments
• Be held in an accessible, welcoming, and non-judgemental environment
• Have a BSL interpreter present
• Use minimum font size 16 on any materials provided, (with any additional accessibility needs fully supported)
• Offer travel cost reimbursement (up to £20)
To recognise the time, expertise, and lived experience shared by participants, we have a budget to provide a £50 “thank you for your time” voucher to up to 20 people taking part in the co-production sessions. This is a token of appreciation for your valued contribution to shaping this important work.
Your input will help create resources that make a real difference — not just for you, but for others across Sunderland who want to quit smoking with the right support in place.
If you’d like to get involved, or to find out more, please contact:
📧 Sarah Lever at slever@ablhealth.co.uk
Sunderland website: https://sunderlandstopsmokingservice.co.uk/
County Durham website: https://www.smokefreecountydurham.co.uk/
Together, we can make sure everyone has the opportunity to live healthier, happier for longer — with support that’s accessible, inclusive, and designed by the people who use it.
The Society was delighted to receive a grant of £1,550 from Sunderland City Council’s Coalfield Area Committee’s Community Chest fund towards much needed repairs to the roof at Houghton le Spring and District Centre for the Blind. The grant encouraged further financial support and we were delighted when the work was completed.
World Sight Day will be held on Thursday 9th October 2025.
This is an annual event always held on the second Thursday of October. It is a global event to draw attention to blindness and visual impairment.
The theme this year is “Love your eyes” and aims to raise awareness of avoidable blindness and vision loss.
Helen Keller (1880 – 1968) was a famous American author, disability rights campaigner, political activist and lecturer who lost her sight and her hearing when she was 19 months of age after a bout of illness. A famous quote of hers is “Blindness is an unfortunate handicap, but true vision does not require eyes”
Sunderland City Council’s West Area Committee very kindly provided a grant of £683 towards the purchase and fitting of 5 automatic door closers on the fire doors within the Society’s offices at 53, St Luke’s Terrace, Pallion, Sunderland. The work was done by Paul Burke Builders and ensures that the building meets our fire regulation responsibilities.
We are extremely grateful for the Community Chest grant and thank members of the West Area Committee for their support.
Accessible Voting Focus Groups
Interested in making voting more accessible? The Electoral Commission has launched a consultation on its Guidance for Returning Officers on assistance with voting for disabled voters, and we need to respond. Blind and partially sighted people have the same right as everyone else to vote independently and in secret but too many are still denied this right. RNIB research shows that only a quarter of blind voters could vote independently and in secret at the last General Election, and 73 per cent of blind and partially sighted people did not know that they could request reasonable adjustments.
Join our focus group to discuss your experience of voting. We’ll look at the challenges people are facing and the solutions the Electoral Commission need to consider. You’ll help us to call for a more accessible system, where every voter is guaranteed a secret and independent vote. It’s evident from our research that blind and partially sighted people’s voting experiences will not improve without wholesale changes to the system.
When?
The dates and times for these sessions to be held are:
Monday 29 September 2-3.30pm – Online
Thursday 2 October: 5-6.30pm – Online
Tuesday 5 October: 10-11.30am – Online
Thursday 9 October:11am-1pm – In Person at the RNIB London Office, The Grimaldi Building. Tea, coffee and maybe biscuits provided, but you’ll have to wait until after the session to get your lunch.
To register your interest in a session please contact the Campaigns Mailbox on Campaign.Mailbox@rnib.org.uk
The online sessions will be held on Microsoft Teams and a link will be sent to you after you have registered for a session.
🎗️ CHARLES BONNET SYNDROME SUPPORT GROUP 🎗️
Hosted by Sunderland and County Durham Royal Society for the Blind
📍 Location:
53 St Luke’s Terrace, Pallion
Sunderland SR4 6NF
📞 Telephone: 0191 567 3939
🗓 2025 Support Group Meeting Dates
All meetings start at 1:00 PM at Pallion.
15th December
or
📍 Location:
Cecil Court, Langley Moor,
County Durham, DH7 8EJ
📞 Telephone: 0191 567 3939
Starting at 11am, 2nd Tuesday of every month.
9th December
👁️🗨️ Charles Bonnet Syndrome (CBS) causes visual hallucinations in people who have lost their sight. If you or someone you know is affected, you’re not alone.
Join us to share experiences, get support, and connect with others who understand.
👐 Everyone is welcome – come along and find support in a friendly environment!
Sunderland and County Durham Royal Society for the Blind are very pleased to announce that we are now a member of the Visionary partnership network
Visionary is a federation of one hundred local societies for blind and partially sighted people in the UK. It aspires to provide support for and raise awareness of the services provided by its members. It has a development fund for small societies and advises national research and campaign groups. A conference for members is held annually and members receive a bi-monthly newsletter.
We believe that people with sight loss should be able to access the services they want when and where they want them and that these services are often best delivered locally. We connect local organisations with each other, develop their skills and organisational health and share information and best practice from across our network.
They make life easier for local sight loss charities by supporting them to access the information they need. They collaborate with our national partners to ensure a two-way flow of information, a route to local markets and creating a stronger sector that makes the biggest difference to blind and partially sighted people.
Sunderland and County Durham Membership 2025-2026
Changes to benefits and employment support:
If anyone needs help completing forms please contact the office on 0191 5673939 and we will do everything we can to help.
Changes to benefits and employment support I find info about what you need to know | RNIB
Recently the Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, launched a green paper (a consultation paper) setting out the UK Government’s major plans and proposals to reform health, disability benefits and employment support.
Before we get into the detail, it’s worth knowing it will be at least a year before any changes are brought in. Importantly, over the next three months we have the opportunity to tell the UK Government what will and won’t work for blind and partially sighted people. At the end of this page we explain how you can respond to the consultation which is now open on parts of these plans.
Below we have summarised the main proposals and what the implications might be. Please come back to this page, which we expect to expand with any further analysis in the weeks ahead.
The proposals will affect parts of the UK differently and only apply directly to the UK Government areas of responsibility. Here’s a breakdown of the proposals:
The green paper says implications for benefit or employment support which are not solely UK Government responsibility will be fully considered before and changes are made.
RNIB has teams in Northern Ireland, England, Scotland and Wales and we will be working together to look at what the changes will means for different parts of the UK.
From November 2026, the Government wants to tighten the criteria for qualifying for Personal Independence Payment (PIP).
We’re concerned that this could make it harder for some blind and partially sighted people to qualify and we will be scrutinising the detail over the next few weeks to understand the impact that this change could have on people with sight loss.
PIP provides vital support for the extra costs that come with being blind or partially sighted. It helps people to access mobility aids, home adaptions, assistive tech and taxis when public transport isn’t accessible.
Although it is not dependent on whether you are working or not, PIP often enables people to stay in employment by covering costs such as transport and assistive tech.
No one living with sight loss should lose out on essential support to live independently. We will be doing all we can to challenge this. We think that the current PIP system, whereby claimants can either accumulate low points across activities or score highly in one or more activity, is the fairest way of assessing PIP entitlement, as everyone’s needs and lives are different. Sight loss is a spectrum and every eye condition affects everyone’s sight differently.
Any tightening of the PIP criteria will need to be voted on in Parliament in the months ahead, so we will be calling on MPs to speak out and we will welcome your support in this.
If the rules do change next year, and someone is at risk of losing PIP money, our legal rights team will be there to help challenge unfair decisions.
Note: In Scotland, Adult Disability Payment has replaced PIP and the implications of these proposals for benefits in Scotland will take time to be understood.
There will also be a Government review of the PIP assessment, to be led by Sir Stephen Timms, Minister for Disabled People and Social Security.
We will make sure we are part of this and will share how the assessment process should be improved for blind and partially sighted people.
There are plans to change incapacity benefits under Universal Credit, which currently give some claimants an additional £416 a month. This could make it even harder for some blind and partially sighted people to meet essential bills. Here’s what the green paper says:
While we will be welcoming a boost to the basic rate of Universal Credit, we’ll be calling out plans that reduce or take away the financial support for people receiving the health top up.
In 2028, the Government plans to scrap the Work Capability Assessment (WCA).
The WCA currently determines whether a person is fit for work for the purpose of their Employment and Support Allowance or Universal Credit. Those in the “limited capability for work-related activity” group receive a top up to their basic Universal Credit award (also known as the health element) at £416 a month.
The Government plans to move to a single assessment, the PIP assessment, for financial support related to health and disability benefits.
If PIP eligibility criteria are tightened and it becomes harder for some people with sight loss to claim, this could make it even harder for people to access essential financial support.
We also know there are considerable issues with decision making within the current benefit system. This urgently needs addressing, to make sure someone’s entitlement to support is not lost in one inaccurate assessment.
We’re pleased to see plans to introduce the “right to try”, so claimants can try work without fear of losing their current benefits if it doesn’t work out. This is something we’ve long been calling for.
We know the fear of reapplying for benefits, which is often an extremely stressful and difficult process, and not being granted the same financial entitlement as before, currently prevents some people with sight loss from feeling able to try work or seek employment support.
In our 2021 survey, for example, half of blind and partially sighted respondents said they worried about their benefits being affected if they asked for employment support.
The Government wants to introduce more frequent reassessments for people claiming the health element of Universal Credit.
The green paper says they “will initially prioritise reassessments for people who are most likely to have had a change in their circumstances including those who have short-term prognoses, for which we can reasonably anticipate a change in health condition has occurred. Over time, we will then prioritise available reassessment capacity for other cohorts who are likely to change award.”
We know that benefit reassessments cause considerable anxiety for people with sight loss, when an individual’s sight is highly unlikely to improve. We will be recommending a more efficient benefit process, where people with evidence of sight loss do not have to undergo repeated unnecessary assessments, to help make the process less stressful and invasive for blind and partially sighted people and cut significant costs for the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and the judiciary.
We’re concerned to hear plans to increase face-to-face assessments for PIP and the health element of Universal Credit, unless there is much better understanding of sight loss among assessors. Additionally, blind and partially sighted claimants can face particular challenges in travelling to assessments in unfamiliar locations.
At present informal observations during face-to-face assessments for disability benefits often lead to poor quality decisions based on incorrect assumptions. For example, reports often contain statements such as the claimant “made good eye contact” during the assessment and then this ‘observation’ is used to form incorrect assumptions about the person’s abilities.
We’ll be calling for all assessment methods, including face-to-face, telephone and video, to be available and optional.
The Work and Pensions Secretary Liz Kendall announced a £1 billion package of tailored support to help disabled people into work. This is welcome and we’ll be looking for opportunities to shape this support so it works for blind and partially sighted job seekers.
Alongside this, we’ll also be pushing for UK Government action to tackle the very real barriers disabled people face when seeking employment. We know that there are 11,000 blind and partially sighted people wanting to work right now – with challenges from attitudinal to technological getting in the way. We want to see the UK Government work hand in hand with employers to overcome these and support people into work.
The green paper also consults on the future of Access to Work which will give us opportunities to call for the scheme to be fixed and make sure people receive timely support.
Improve your health and fitness.
Future Health North East are a community interest company dedicated to supporting individuals who are visually impaired by offering FREE personal training-style sessions tailored to your needs.
Our goal is to help you to improve your fitness, enhance your day-to-day life skills and to feel more confident in your physical and mental well-being. People of all abilities are welcome to attend our sessions, which focus mainly on movement and are structured by qualified personal trainers.
We believe that fitness should be accessible to everyone, and our sessions are designed to be inclusive, supportive and empowering.
Join us at Sunderland and County Durham Royal Society for the Blind, 53, St Luke’s Terrace, Pallion, Sunderland SR4 6NF and take the first step toward a healthier, stronger future!
Anyone interested in attending these sessions should telephone the Society on 0191 5673939 for more information.
Today’s session with Stanley Group has been a little different, we attended The Louisa Centre in Stanley and took part in 2 different activities for the Blind, including Blind Archery and Curling. They also allowed the Group to try out their new Gym equipment. Come and along and join us. Contact our office on 0191 5673939 for more details.
Photo is of one of our members – Mike Crozier and his partner, Susan, who ran the Great North Run. Susan acted as Mike’s guide runner. They raised over £1000 for Guide Dogs and around £400 for Sunderland and County Durham Royal Society for the Blind. Sponsorship money is still coming in.
Mike’s aim was to complete the course and stay alive! He did this in style and raised over £1,000 for the two charities.
Thank you Mike and Susan for your fantastic effort.
DATES FOR YOUR DIARY – All held at Pallion, Sunderland
AFTERNOON TEA – First Thursday of the month
1:30pm – 3pm
Only £2.50 per person. Selection of sandwiches, cake and savouries. Booking essential.
QUIZ MORNING
We now run these twice a month, see below for the next one. Great for a social gathering, a quiz and as always refreshments.
MEN’S GROUP – Second Monday of the month.
1:30 – 2:30
COFFEE MORNING – SUNDERLAND – Second Wednesday of the month. 10am – noon
MACULAR MEETING – 4th Wednesday of the month.
1:30 pm – 2:30pm.
SOCIAL GET TOGETHER – Please see dates below.
10am – noon
ONGOING SERVICES ON OFFER
Drop in for information or just a chat. Various literature available i.e., Catalogues, information leaflets
Coffee Mornings/Afternoon Tea/Social get together.
Quiz morning’s
Various support groups
Resource Centre
Loan of magnifying equipment
Braille mentoring
IT and Technology Support
Counselling
Benefits/Advocacy
Access to work/Job Club
Living with Sight Loss Event
British Wireless for the Blind Audio Equipment loan
BOWLING
Why not pop along and meet up with The Sunderland Visually Impaired 10 Pin Bowling Team the ‘Sunderland Spinners’.
The Bowling Teams now meet at Washington Hollywood Bowling Alley.
Anyone interested can telephone Annmarie Dunlavey on 07455905925 for more details.
All are welcome.
BRITISH WIRELESS FOR THE BLIND
We continue to be an agent for BWFB who provide audio devices to those needing equipment to listen to audio books or play music. There are various players available on loan free of charge. Please call us to see if you meet the criteria to borrow one of these or find out what else may be available to you.
If you require any further information on any of the above services, please call 0191 5673939 or email office@sundrsb.org.uk and we will be happy to help.
Our office opening hours are Monday to Friday 9.30am – 3pm and you are more than welcome to call into the office at Pallion for a cuppa and a chat.
We look forward to hearing from you soon.
The Society has been extremely fortunate to be awarded funding through the City Council’s Links for Life Fund. This will enable us to offer many services for the benefit of visually impaired people and their families.
Services include;
• Monthly Coffee Mornings
• Monthly Afternoon Teas
• Monthly Social meetings
• Monthly Men’s Support Group
• Quizzes
• Monthly Macular Support Group
• One to one IT training
• Access to our professional Counselling service
• Healthy Lifestyle Activities
• Monthly LGBT Support Group
• Weekly Braille lessons
Anyone interested in attending these activities should telephone the office on 0191 5673939 for more information.
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