About the project
This section contains information about the history of the project, from the founding members to where it is now and further on into where the charity hopes to be in the coming years.
The Start of the Project
U Can Do I.T. started life as the WAACIS Project in 1996 as part of the Lionel Wigram Memorial Trust who, together with Henry Smith's Charity, financed the project.
Anthony Wigram (a former national chairman of PHAB), in conjunction with Dr. Janet Larcher, a consultant on micro technology aids for people with disabilities, and Mark Williams, head of the Augmentative Communication Service at Charing Cross Hospital, all recognised the need to provide Internet training for disabled people.
While many disabled people can raise money to buy computers themselves, or have computer equipment donated to them by various charities, there has been until now a complete lack of home-based training available at an affordable cost from any charitable body. Therefore, very often these computers have remained unused.
The Pilot Project
The pilot project lasted for two years during which time we employed full-time tutors and gave training to 90 students. The pilot project proved the need for the WAACIS service and so in July 1998 WAACIS became an independent charity, eventually changing it's name to U Can Do I.T. in April 2002.
Recruitment of Tutors
In September 1999 we decided that we could achieve faster progress if we employed part-time freelance tutors who would be remunerated on the basis of a fee per training session delivered.
The great advantage of this scheme is that our tutors can make their own arrangements with students, and give training sessions at a time convenient to both. We are also able to attract highly skilled people with excellent technical abilities and good teaching skills. This is very cost effective as the tutor's fee not only includes the tuition, but also the travel and preparation time.
We now have 65 tutors covering all of the London boroughs, South Wales, Edinburgh, Merseyside & Blackpool, Kent and Sussex. It is our determined ambition to extend the reach of the charity throughout the United Kingdom.
U Can Do I.T. Students
The charity aims to train blind, deaf and disabled people how to use computers and be familiar with sending and receiving emails and surfing the web.
One of our major problems is that disabled people are very hard to reach. Except for the excellent magazine "Getting There", which is produced by London Transport, there are no easy media channels available to reach disabled people. Many disabled people live on their own and can be quite self contained, even isolated. The result is that we have had to set up a specific outreach department whose job is to contact every disabled organisation and to let them know of the unique service which U Can Do I.T. provide.
The estimated number of disabled people in the United Kingdom is the subject of many different estimates giving very different results. The fact is that the total number of people actually drawing Disability Living Allowance (as at 28 February 2005) is 2,673,000. However, some disabled organisations claim, quite rightly, that there may be as many as 8 million people with some form of disability.
Only a very small fraction of this number of people are in need of the U Can Do I.T. service. We estimate the figure to be somewhere between 2-4%. The probable maximum is 150,000 people. This is because very large numbers of disabled people are over 70 years old and other large sections include people with learning difficulties who cannot benefit from computer training and people who already have computer knowledge. A further large section simply do not want to learn I.T.
As already explained, reaching this audience is not easy. However, over the last 6 years, we have given more than 22,000 individual tutorials to 2,000 people. Whilst this is a considerable achievement, it does not come near achieving the mission of the charity which is that every single disabled person in the United Kingdom who needs a computer and can benefit from it, should have a computer and be benefitting from it.
