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Papworth Trust is passionate about helping disabled people have greater equality, choice and independence in their lives.
As a charity and registered social landlord, Papworth Trust works with people with disabilities throughout the East of England and beyond,
as well as advising businesses, local authorities and other organisations.
The trust started nearly a hundred years ago in 1917 as a charity focusing on tuberculosis and our founder,
Pendrill Varrier-Jones, was a social entrepreneur who worked out that if you give people fresh air and sunlight, they get better.
He worked out if you sent them back to the cities they'd get ill again and so he built places for them to live, places for them to work
and that's the foundation of the trust.
We've moved on a lot, you'll be pleased to hear, over 100 years.
We still think it's really important for people to have good places to live and great places to work - but not all collected
in one village which is where the trust started.
We now work across the whole of the eastern region, working with over 17,000 disabled people every year to provide
a whole range of services but not losing the heart of where we're at, about making sure people can live a fulfilled life
with as many barriers as possible removed.
We provide a number of services to a whole bunch of people with disabilities.
We're passionate about making sure people have equality, choice and independence and they are the 3 things
that pervade all of the services we offer.
So we build houses - most of those are wheelchair accessible.
We help people get work and keep work - we work with over 4000 people every year to do that.
We run a number of day centres where people can learn to do different things - perhaps it's about learning to cook,
or learning to read and write better - but it could be about learning to socialise and integrate with the community more fully.
We help a number of people with their personal care and support needs and We run a service where we help people
who have acquired a disability overcome that, and we have a 90% success rate with that.
Across all of those services the glue is that we make sure that disabled people are at the heart of what we do in making
decisions about the services we offer and the way that we deliver them.
So those things together make Papworth Trust what it is today.
Financially, this year we'll probably be just under £16 million. Next year I think we'll grow to about £20 million.
Numbers are always a bit of a crude way of measuring what we do. In terms of clients - which is more interesting - we work
with about 17,000 people now every year.
I expect that'll continue to grow and the finance is really a measure of how much we get done.
So financially we're growing a lot, we've grown a lot over the last few years and that's what makes Papworth a really exciting
place to be because we're constantly finding more ways to do more with more disabled people - for them to have greater
equality, choice and independence.
We'd love to do more to get people to help us through fundraising - we're not in the category of fluffy dogs or beautiful children
and so we have a harder sell in terms of raising money for disabled people. But we've got some fantastic schemes where
we've helped a lot of people really achieve a great deal by generating fundraising. We need to do that more and more.
The whole market is moving to a far more personalised agenda where disabled people have much greater choice over the services
they use - which is fantastic, we really support that. We need to make sure that we are agile as an organisation and
move towards that market place where people are choosing to buy services. Perhaps just a couple of sessions a week rather than
going somewhere for the whole week and make sure that we make those accessible to people so that they can enjoy those services,
get great value from them and progress in their journey as they enjoy their lives.
What Papworth Trust means today varies for many of our clients. For some, it's an organisation they've been with for many years;
they've grown up with. They've perhaps been a tenant of ours for many years or come to one of our centres -
and they don't want that to change. That's a challenge for us and an opportunity for us to help those people along their journey.
For some people it's just the referrer to which they get sent by JobCentre Plus and the answer is "you're out of work,
you should be in work, off you go, you're going to Papworth." So for some people there's very little choice in that.
Hopefully we make them feel good about that choice.
For some, we're the person that makes life possible in many ways because we could be working with those people 24 hours a day,
7 days a week and it means that they get up, they get washed, they get dressed, they get fed and they have a much better
quality of life so I think to try and put a blanket over it and say what we mean to everyone is impossible.
We are passionate about working with each of our clients as an individual so we want to do more for more disabled people.
What does that mean? I think scale is important because the bigger we are, the more efficiently and effectively we can deliver services.
So we started in Papworth Everard as a village, we've moved into Cambridgeshire, into the whole of the Eastern Region,
now we're well beyond the Eastern Region - I see no reason to stop that. Does that means we'll be national one day?
I certainly see that that could be a possibility and it quite excites me if we are. Is that the thing that's going to drive
everything we do? No. What's going to drive us is can we deliver good quality services to more people so that they have
greater equality, choice and independence.