I am thrilled to be able to share the first 'Dyslexia Hero' story on The Studying With Dyslexia Blog with you.

In Wakefield, community group, Managing Dyslexia, meet together lead by Vanessa Goddard to support each other in their abilities to manage their own experiences of having dyslexia.

I sent Vanessa some questions and this is what she wrote.

Vanessa writes...

I run a community group for adults with dyslexia in Sandal library in Wakefield. The library offer us the space free of charge and provide us with dyslexia friendly reading material. I work together with the learners on developing their English skills but we also give dyslexia Awareness talks to local businesses, libraries, job centres, mental health services etc so that we are making people more aware of the disability.

We also do fund raisers to fund our groups and help to pay for our specialised resources.

The learners offer peer support to each other to ‘stay mentally well’ and help each other to cope with the dyslexia.

We recently received funding from the Big Lottery to start another group so that we can reach more people with dyslexia.

In answer to your 3 questions:

‘What are the positive effects of dyslexia on your lives?’

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Dyslexia has given us the opportunity to come together and make a difference to each other’s lives and the lives of other people with the condition. We are talented at ‘seeing the big picture’ and can problem solve more easily than others. We have great empathy and good communication skills which makes us good at explaining dyslexia to others when we give our talks.

‘What strategies do you use to help with studying?’

Mainstream education didn’t work for any of us but in this group we have really started to progress our skills because we use a lot of repetition to help our short term memory skills, we are all the same so we have great empathy for each other - it’s non judgmental and supportive.

How are you helping others?

We help each other with coping strategies, we educate others to understand dyslexia and we fund raise so that we can start other groups and reach more people to join a group just like ours.

As their tutor I believe that every member of the group are Dyslexia Heroes and it would be lovely to be mentioned on the Studying With Dyslexia Blog.