About us
About us
Background to Disability LIB
Disability LIB is an alliance of 7 organisations offering capacity building support and advice to Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) in England using rights based principles and business skills, at a time of financial crisis and political opportunity.
What is a DPO?
A disabled people’s organisation (DPO) is an organisation that has a membership and managing board with a majority of disabled people, and whose objectives are the rights and equality of disabled people.
What is capacity building?
Capacity building is a type of assistance or support that is provided to organisations in order to help them improve their effectiveness and boost performance. This assistance usually focuses on management, leadership and governance, and organisational systems.
Disability LIB recognises that DPOs play a vital role in challenging disablism and discrimination. We value the diversity of DPOs and support their development as a specific and distinct sector within both local communities and wider society.
Disability LIB came about from a piece of research that identified the need for a specific DPO capacity building project. Our report ‘Thriving or Surviving’ shows how DPO’s are disadvantaged and restricted in their development in a range of areas. These include securing and sustaining funding, the additional costs of access, commissioning & competitive tendering processes, skills retention and shortages, governance & leadership, capacity building support as well as the exclusion of DPOs from mainstream capacity-building activities.
Download our "Thriving or Surviving" report here
The project has been granted funding from the Big Lottery Fund to run for three years, until June 2011.
The Disability LIB alliance
Each partner within the alliance has a specific lead role and responsibility in achieving our outcome of providing capacity building support to 200 DPOs in particular areas of expertise.