Reasonable Access - Trustee Report 2022-23
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).
Previous reports (2019-2021, 2021-22)
Our previous two Trustee Accounts and Reports are online at the Reasonable Access Charity Commission webpages. Contact Reasonable Access if more accessible formats 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 are not disabled themselves but 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.
Overview of 2022-23 year
Reasonable Access continued to operate our website, Slack community and mailing list. Our trustees and volunteers continue to be impacted by the ongoing effects of Covid-19 and the realities of living as disabled people in the UK at present. We continue to try and embody the principles of disability justice as trustees and volunteers and in our work.
This report was delayed because the Charity Commission changed the website logins. The only way to get new logins was by phone. The phonelines were extremely busy, the phone lines were not always open at published times and often calls were cut off after long waits. Telephones are not very accessible to us and we had to make several attempts before we got through. We will be feeding back to the Charity Commission that without rapid phone response from them, this process was not inclusive or accessible to make disabled people.
Finances
Our financial year is from 2nd February 2022 to 1st February 2023.
Reasonable Access has money in a business bank account and a charitable status PayPal account.
On 2nd February 2022 our total balance was: £1,837.62. On 1st February 2023 our total balance was: £1,876.26.
Our effective expenditure was £5.00.
Funding application
This year we made our first funding bid to Trust for London's Disability Justice Fund. We received invaluable guidance from Inclusion London who promoted the fund and ran workshops to help small organisations like ours make applications. One of our volunteers attended on our behalf and used their own expertise to help us complete the application.
We do not yet know the outcome as the planned allocation dates have been delayed. We hope to hear early in the 2023-24 funding year.
Baseline finances
We continue to offer funding towards accessing relevant disability related court hearings in-person. Since 2020, the courts are more open and able to manage remote-access so many hearings are attended that way by observers as well as litigants.
We seem to have resolved our PayPal difficulties and our account is now functioning correctly. We have restored our PayPal donate button on our website. We receive a very welcome recurring £10 (minus fees) monthly donation to PayPal from one of our associates.
We have also set up a Stripe account as planned and Stripe-donate page on our website but so far no one has used it beyond setup testing.
Donations
We received a total of £43.64 in donations entirely from disabled individuals which we greatly value.
Donations included £5 for the cost of the www.reasonableaccess.org.uk website domain name which Doug Paulley, one of our trustees kindly pays for. We declare this donation of domain name costs to be transparent and recognise all actual costs of running Reasonable Access as much as possible.
Future spending
We hope to find out if we are successful with the Disability Justice Fund application.