Message from Steve James, Group Chief Executive

Welcome to our website. We hope that it gives you a flavour of the services we provide and our approach to supporting people. We passionately believe that we are about supporting people to lead a rich and enjoyable life, making choices like anyone would.

Avenues has changed the way it provides services, creating a Group structure of charitable organisations that focus on different parts of our work:  

• Avenues Trust Support Services concentrates on providing high quality individually planned support in small, specialist, residential settings for people with learning disabilities and mental health issues
• Avenues Trust Community Support Services provides community based support to a wide range of adults and young people in their own homes
• Community Futures Kent is a person centred community development organisation based in West Kent
• Optua, a Suffolk based charity that provides a wide range of services for disabled people, joined the Avenues Trust Group in April 2011.  Optua's services include: Advice & Advocacy, Leisure and sport activities, Community Transport, Volunteering, Support Services (including home care and supported housing), Optua UK - case management for people with an acquired brain injury. Optua also represents disabled people on a wide range of voluntary and statutory committees, involving the planning, monitoring and provision of services for disabled people across Suffolk.

The individual websites tell you more about their services.

We've tried very hard to describe what we do in English, not jargon, which is why we describe what we do as "support to enjoy life".  This will be different for different people, which is why we are committed to an individual approach, choice and control - not because it's the latest flavour of the month but it's because it's how you support someone to have a rich and enjoyable life.

No organisation can provide a quality service without quality staff.  The Avenues Group is committed to supporting and developing staff.  For instance our Learning & Development programme is second to none and we were very pleased to win a Regional National Training Award in 2009.

We would love to hear from you if you would like to know more about our services, or would like to talk about working for us.

Steve James

Group Chief Executive