Insight Society helps and supports people who are blind and partially sighted who live in Birmingham and the surrounding areas. We are a bilingual and multi-cultural organisation that is mainly managed by blind people. All the services that we provide are normally free of charge to our clients.

Insight Society became a non-profit making company in 2003. We currently offer a wide range of different services. Some of these are arranged for men and women separately to meet the cultural and religious expectations of our clients and their families. Insight Society has clients of all ages as well as many different nationalities, religions, and ethnic backgrounds.

We rely on grants and other types of funding from many different organisations to pay our operate costs. We have a long track record of providing high quality services that have been popular with our stakeholders.

Whether you are blind or visually impaired yourself or you know someone who is, please get in touch with us. We are here to help and advise you and your family and if appropriate your employers, teachers and other people who are important to your life and happiness.

For many years we have provided a reliable home visiting service. Our Service Users receive regular visits at their homes by our staff and volunteers. These will continue, but in the future, we foresee using social media much more extensively than we have ever done before. Our plans include training our Service Users how to use suitable Smart Phone / iPad etc, helping them to buy or loan the equipment they need and supplying SIM cards when necessary. 

We plan to use Social Media for both one-to-one information, advice, counselling, and referral services and for small group activities which our Service Users tell us they enjoy very much. These include arts and exercise classes that we receive funding for providing from the Arts Council and Sport England.  

We are determined to remain up to date and 'relevant' in the eyes of our stakeholders. For example, at present, we often arrange medical appointments and meetings with Social Workers for our Service Users, providing transport, translation services and moral support. As a result of Covid-19 NHS organisations are increasingly only offering on-line consultations so our traditional delivery model cannot be sustained in the post Covid-19 future. Its essential that our services 'move with the times' to remain relevant by being able to 'join-in' video consultations when asked to do so by our Service Users and our stakeholders including NHS organisations and Social Services Departments in Birmingham and the Black Country.

Most of Insight Society's directors are blind or severely visually impaired. This has been the organisation became a Company Limited by Guarantee in 2003. At that time, we worked with Birmingham Voluntary Services Council to develop financial systems that took account of the fact that most directors could not 'see' the company’s accounts and other financial documents and records. The procedures developed 17 years ago have proven to be successful and robust.

They include us having our Annual Accounts produced and 'signed' by a firm of Chartered Accountants even though our turnover is below the amount where this is compulsory. We also always have a sighted non-executive sighted director who is a qualified accountant. We also discussed the financial controls policy that we have used with the Government Office for the West Midlands to make sure that they met its expectations for organisations that received funding from the European Regional Development Fund; which they did. We went on to receive grants from the European Social Fund and ERDF regularly.

We have never been asked to repay a grant because a funder was concerned over our financial systems and record keeping. We have never faced any allegations of bribery or corruption. As we are a small company in which all the directors are pro-actively involved.

The directors of Insight Society are confident that any type of financial mismanagement would be extremely hard to conceal from us.

Our phone number is 07399 782552