L’Arche gives us a model for how integration of those with learning difficulties can be a truly compassionate project

L’Arche gives us a model for how integration of those with learning difficulties can be a truly compassionate project

When I worked as a support worker for adults with learning difficulties in residential care facilities in North Yorkshire, I sometimes felt as if I was working on a production line rather than improving the lives of vulnerable people.

The paperwork was relentless, and the times to administer medication and support people to go to bed were so deafeningly exact that these care homes felt seriously inorganic. When I began to look around for movements outside the mainstream care sector, I was intrigued and encouraged to discover the Camphill Movement and L’Arche – two movements that advocated community-driven visions of building relationships with people with learning difficulties. But looking at the situation from the outside, it seems that the visions of both their respective “founders” – Karl König and Jean Vanier – are under threat.

The Camphill Movement originated in the context of Rudolf Steiner’s “anthroposophy”, which affirms the importance of mystical consciousness and spiritual growth in every single person, including people with disabilities. Its Jewish founder, Karl König, had fled from persecution in Austria: the Anthroposophical Society was banned throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. In 1939, König started Camphill Estate, a community for children with special needs, in Aberdeenshire, in an area that was one of the first places that Christian missionaries visited, near Maryculter, one of two Preceptories for the Knights Templar in Scotland.

Camphill Estate retained a firm connection with this past: evocative spiritual festivities took place, during which, for example, children with learning difficulties came forward to light a candle on a spiral of moss. The language of “staff” and “patient” was eschewed in favour of “villagers” – as people with learning difficulties were called – and “co-workers” – who lived with them. The visionaries of Camphill believed strongly in learning from people with learning difficulties.

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