## Reasonable Access - Trustee Report 2023-24 ## About Reasonable Access Reasonable Access was set-up in late 2018 by the three disabled founder-trustees: - Doug Paulley - Esther Loukin and - Natalya Dell as a Deaf and Disabled Person's Organisation (DDPO) . ## Previous reports Our previous three Trustee Accounts and Reports (for 2022-23, 2021-22 and starting report at 2019-21) are online at the Reasonable Access Charity Commission webpages . Contact us via our website contact page if you need this report in a different format. ## Governance of Reasonable Access Reasonable Access still has the same 3 founder-trustees who are all (100%) disabled: - Natalya Dell - Esther Loukin - Doug Paulley ## **Non-disabled parents and carers of disabled people** 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 2023-24 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 with increasingly deteriorating public services for disabled people. We continue to try and embody the principles of disability justice as trustees and volunteers and in our work. Individual trustees continued to do disability activism individually and through our association with Reasonable Access. Esther Loukin delivered the Swarthmore Lecture at the April 2023 Quaker Yearly Meeting which was very well received. ## Finances Our financial year is from 2nd February 2023 to 1st February 2024. Reasonable Access has money in a business bank account and a charitable status PayPal account. We also have a Stripe account for receiving money. On 2nd February 2023 our total balance was: £1,876.26. On 1st February 2024 our total balance was: £9,463.00. Our income was £7,919.50 Our effective expenditure was £482.00 ## Successful funding application - Trust for London After making our first funding bid to Trust for London's Disability Justice Fund at the end of our last reporting period we learned we had been successful. Our project is carrying out interviews with British Sign Language (BSL) signing Deaf people in Great Britain about their experiences of accessing Goods and Services (anything from healthcare to leisure like a concert) and strategies they have developed to get their language and access needs met. We hope to use the interview findings to develop some Deaf-friendly pilot materials to support Deaf signers assert and enforce their legal rights to Goods and Services over the next 2 years. We were awarded £14,875.00 in two instalments, we have taken up one payment of £7,437.50 to date. We expect to spend money on interpreting costs, paying participants and employing people to assist with this project and on commissioning the pilot materials from Deaf BSL signing creatives. ## Baseline finances We continue to offer funding towards accessing relevant disability related court hearings in-person. Many courts are providing remote access, including remote-access for observers at in-person hearings so we have not had any requests for this as remote often works better for disabled observers. We have spent some Trust for London money on a funded Zoom account to run interviews and potentially other events. This has worked well when used and we would like to make more use of this. ## Donations After Esther's Swarthmore Lecture we were contacted by some Quaker groups who collected and invited their members to donate to Reasonable Access. We received a total of £482.00 which is greatly appreciated. We continue to receive a very welcome recurring £10 monthly donation to PayPal from one of our associates. ## Future spending We hope to carry out more BSL project interviews in the 2024-25 and 2025-26 years and commission some Deaf-led pilot resources which will be publicly available from our website as part of the conditions of our funding.