Volunteering England is encouraging volunteers and volunteer-involving organisations to lobby MPs to support a campaign to enable disabled people to volunteer. The campaign is a result of research undertaken by SCOPE which showed that one of the biggest barriers to volunteering for people with disabilities was lack of adjustments or assistance to enable them to participate.
Over half of disabled people are currently unemployed, and opportunities to volunteer could provide experience, skills and knowledge which are useful when applying for paid work. But SCOPE’s report Time to get equal in volunteering: tackling disablism found that whilst the government has an Access to Work scheme to help pay for adjustments for disabled people at work, there was no such equivalent scheme for volunteering.
SCOPE is challenging the government to come up with a similar subsidy for voluntary organisations and is urging MPs to sign an Early Day Motion (number 846) calling for the government to create a scheme similar to Access to Work to fund reasonable adjustments for disabled volunteers.
This campaign is also complemented by the revised Compact Volunteering Code of Good Practice, which was launched in October 2005. In the Code Government recognises that it is legitimate for voluntary and community organisations to include the costs of enabling greater access to volunteering (eg removing the physical barriers) in relevant applications for funding whilst voluntary and community organisations undertake to include reasonable costs for reducing barriers to volunteering in relevant funding bids.
Early Day Motion 846
That this House welcomes new research from Scope's Year of the Volunteer on tackling discrimination against disabled people in volunteering; notes that volunteering is a valuable route to other opportunities including training and paid employment; further notes the Government's aim to get more disabled people off benefit and into paid work; is concerned that there is no financial support for organisations to make reasonable adjustments for disabled volunteers and that as a result disabled people are under-represented as volunteers; and calls upon the Government to create a similar scheme to Access to Work to fund reasonable adjustments for disabled volunteers.
