Introduction
U Can Do I.T. is a registered charity and we have to raise all the money we need from Charitable Trusts, The Learning and Skills Council and similar Government sponsored organisations, together with companies and individual donations.
For the year ending April 2007 we raised a total of £475,000 which was comprised as follows:
Charitable Trusts 62.88%
Local Government Grants 16.08%
Learning and Skills Council 13.24%
Commercial Companies 4.36%
Interest 2.31%
Student Fees 1.13%
You can see from the above that the bulk of the money raised comes from Charitable Trusts and we are extremely grateful for the long term support we have received from many loyal sponsors.
The funding we receive from Government sponsored agencies includes London Councils and is principally derived from the European Social Fund. The same is true for the funds we have received through the Learning and Skills Councils. These organisations make their grants through a tendering system towards specific projects in defined areas. This system is highly competitive and unfortunately there is no repeat business as every year a new tendering system is introduced and the defined measures categorise different groups of people. It is fair to say that the funding allocated to disabled people represents a very small percent of the total funds available.
The amount of money we receive from Commercial Companies is very low indeed and we are working on trying to increase partnerships in this area. The main problem is that most companies want to donate to charities which in some way compliment the work of the company and so far we have been unable to create effective attachments of this kind.
As you can see the amount of money we receive from Student Fees is negligible. It is part of the basic U Can Do I.T. philosophy that the service we provide should be affordable to our client base. Since nearly 80% of our students survive on Government grants and are therefore in fact in virtual poverty they cannot afford to pay substantial fees. For this reason we charge a token fee of £5 per lession given to all students receiving less than £100 per week. There is then a sliding scale depending on the income of the student, but the top rate is only £16 per lesson against the actual cost of each lesson given of £88.
Unfortunately, U Can Do I.T. gets no direct support from Central Government. We have recently completed a comprehensive survey of all grants made to disabled people via the Ministry of Work and Pensions, Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health. This comes to the very large total of nearly £43 billion per annum.
The bulk of this money goes into disability benefits and payments of various kinds, including Incapacity Benefit, but there are also a number of smaller, specialist funds such as the Disabled Students Allowance, Access to Work and Pathways to Work which are designed to achieve specific objectives. Unfortunately none of these special areas are applicable to the work of U Can Do I.T. We are doing our best to change this situation.
