With a grant from this charity, we will be able to engage more wheelchair users into our activities. The wheelchair users who we work with who we work with experienced a great deal of isolation and exclusion during and since the Covid-19 lockdown added to their mobility challenges. Most of them are from minority ethnic backgrounds. We will invest this grant in a series of excursions and visits for wheelchair users during 2023.

Since the autumn of 2022 we have been helping our Service Users to understand different types of modern artistic performances, including ‘multi-media’ experiences. The participants in the project are all blind or severely visually impaired. They are learning how to use digital technology to enrich creative exhibitions and artistic performances. We expect that this training will help some of them to become freelance artists and employees in the Creative Sector in both London and Birmingham.

The project has recruited 20 participants, most of who were accompanied by their own support worker. Most of them lived in Birmingham and in Brixton and Lambeth in South London. The participants included refugees, asylum seekers and people who use English as a Second Language. About three-quarters of them were women. The Tutors have been mainly professional artists and producers who use digital technology as part of their creative practice. They are also being supported by staff and volunteers provided by Insight Society who are experts in guiding BSVI people. The project will include producing and presenting two public performances which will be immersive/interactive digital technology experiences.

A grant that we received from the Trusthouse Charitable Foundation is being invested in our well-established Information Advice and Guidance programme for visually impaired people. It has enabled us to increase the amount of IAG that we are able to deliver in community languages. It has also enabled us to arrange for 3 volunteers to do courses leading to new NVQ Level 3 qualifications in Information, Advice and Guidance. This is a very good way of developing Insight resources human resources for the future.