Enable Ability – Chairman’s Chosen Charities 2023

We are delighted to announce that one of the two Chosen Charities this year will be Enable Ability.

“Unless you are one of Enable Ability’s 800 different service users, or their family and friends, or carer, or work in the disability sector, then you have probably never heard of us! Yet, we have been operating as a charity since 1950 when we started helping people with cerebral palsy, and now we provide a range of services for people with mild, moderate and severe disabilities for ages from 5 to 65, living in Portsmouth and South East Hampshire.

Working in partnership with our clients, their families and carers, we provide a range of 15 quality, professional and confidential services. Our focus is on the care, welfare and advancement of disabled people from the age of 5 onwards.

Our charity mission is simple: through the provision of services that offer care, friendship, stimulation and motivation, we support disabled people to achieve their full potential – whilst giving families and carers much needed respite. Our services are engaging, social and lots of fun, and with dedicated and well trained staff, the children, young people and adults who use our services can progress in safe and supportive environments.

Enable Ability’s 15 specialist services are carefully designed around service users, participants, and their family’s needs to ensure participants receive full benefit from the service(s) they are attend. Services are available predominantly during school holidays, but also during evenings and weekends. They include playschemes, one-to-one befriending, advocacy, an employability social enterprise, wheelchair basketball and youth groups.

The majority of our services are catered to our biggest age range of children, who are 5-18 years old. Many of our children attend local Special Educational Needs & Disabilities (SEND) schools, to ensure that the education that they receive fully meets their needs. We work with both children who have a mild to moderate disability, and those who have much higher levels of need. The most common disabilities presented by participants include Autism, Learning disabilities, physical disabilities, Down Syndrome and Global Development Delay.

As our users have grown with us we found that we needed to offer further services to meet their needs when their age or capabilities made them ineligible for our existing offerings. These are exciting times for us as we move into new areas such as work experience, job creation, supported volunteering and social enterprises.

All our projects are so much fun in their own way, but our Wheelchair Basketball service is a bit of a hidden gem! Accessible for all abilities, the service allows both wheelchair and non-wheelchair users to partake in friendly competition on a weekly basis. A number of our attendees have even gone onto play for Great Britain in the National League!

For more details about any of our services, please take a look at our website: www.enableability.org.uk”

Registered charity No: 276422

Their website: https://enableability.org.uk/