Reasonable Access - 2021-22 Trustee Report and Accounts
Reasonable Access - Trustee Report 2021-2022
About Reasonable Access
Reasonable Access was set-up in late 2018 by the three disabled founder-trustees:
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Doug Paulley
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Esther Loukin and
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Natalya Dell
' as a Deaf and Disabled Person s Organisation (DDPO).
Over a period of a year, the trustees created a website, Twitter account and completed the process of registering as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation (CIO).
Previous reports (2019-21)
Our first, 2019-21 Trustee Accounts and Report is online at the Reasonable Access Charity Commission webpages. Contact Reasonable Access if more accessible copies of our reports and accounts are needed.
Governance of Reasonable Access
Reasonable Access still has the same 3 founder-trustees:
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Natalya Dell
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Esther Loukin
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Doug Paulley
All of the Reasonable Access trustees are disabled.
Reasonable Access welcome the involvement of 'proxies' which is our term for people who may challenge discrimination on behalf of someone who does not have capacity to challenge it themselves (e.g. lack of legal capacity, or is a child). However, we intend at Reasonable Access, to remain majority disabled-led. To remain a DDPO, 75% of our leadership and any future employees must be disabled people.
We have continued to increase the number of people involved with Reasonable Access on a volunteer basis. We have recruited 3 volunteers to support the development of the Slack Community, rules and ethos and act as moderators once the space is opened up.
Overview of the 2021-22 year
Reasonable Access trustees and volunteers have continued to be impacted by the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Living as a disabled person continues to be difficult with healthcare, social care and other challenges. Two trustees had had to take several weeks of disability-related sick-leave completely away from Reasonable Access work during 2021-22.
Where we had limited capacity at Reasonable Access we were honest with people and organisations that reached out to us, and did what we could to provide support such as promoting projects and linking people up with one another.
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Reasonable Access - 2021-22 Trustee Report and Accounts
We did not add much to our website, but we continued to link people to pages on it regularly and wrote a few blog posts and shared information on social media.
We explored some partnership working opportunities with a supportive law firm around complaint making but realised that Reasonable Access did not yet have the capacity to do the work needed for our part of the partnership. We remain on very positive terms with this organisation and the individuals involved and may reconsider this kind of project in the future.
We continued to network with different individuals and organisations with similar and allied aims of improving disability rights, education about rights and opportunity to challenge discrimination.
Future plans
We plan to re-establish some working patterns and improve our working relationships with volunteers around manageable projects and capacity building.
We hope to get support to put in a funding bid to improve the accessibility of our website to BSL users because we have noticed the high level of interest in access rights from BSL users following the high profile #WhereIsTheInterpreter and #LittleMix BSL BSL/English interpreter access cases.
Reasonable Access - Accounts and Finances
Accounts Time Period
The Charity Commission have requested accounts for the one-year time period of 2nd February 2021 until 1st February 2022.
2021-22 accounts
On 1st February 2022, Reasonable Access had £1,740.15.
We received a single donation of £94.47 in July 2021 from an individual.
Our total income as of 1st February 2022 was £1,837.62.
We had £0 expenditure in the 2021-22 accounting period.
Reasons for £0 expenditure
Many of the court hearings we would normally support in-person attendance to, were held online because of ongoing Covid-19 impacts upon disabled litigants. Where hearings were in-person many of our members did not feel safe enough to risk travelling on public transport or being in court spaces where masks are no longer mandated.
Doug Paulley, trustee, continued to donate the web-hosting for our website which is hard to identify as a value because he hosts several other not-for-profit websites on the same reseller account.
Our website domain costs £5 every two years which is donated to us at present. Other than this and donated hosting, our website has no cost to us at present.
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Reasonable Access - 2021-22 Trustee Report and Accounts
PayPal and alternatives
We experienced some difficulties with PayPal silently 'limiting' our account which prevented us from receiving donations or moving money from the account. We discovered this limitation when a kind donor let us know the donation link on our website did not work. We spent considerable time trying to provide PayPal with the documentation required to unlimit our account. We found that the PayPal website repeatedly demanded information we had already submitted and we had to resort to telephoning PayPal to get actual resolution. As all of our trustees find phones difficult and one of us was still in personal litigation with PayPal for disability discrimination around their poor telephony access and lack of alternatives, we are hoping to minimise or avoid PayPal entirely in the future.
Based on positive reports from another small English non-profit organisation, we researched and decided to open a Stripe account to give ourselves access to an alternative payments system.
Future spending
We plan to look into funding applications and hope to work with a volunteer who has expertise in this area when they are available to work with us. We are also finalising the setup of a Slack community which we were able to get on a business subscription for free via the Charitable Digital Support Exchange programme. We plan to explore other options via this programme such as a Zoom pro account.
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