…you’ve probably never heard of us!

Unless you are one of Enable Ability’s over 800 different service users, or their family and friends, or carer, or work in the disability sector, then you have probably never heard of us!! Yet we have been operating as a charity since 1950 when we started helping people with cerebral palsy and now provide a range of services for people with mild, moderate and severe disabilities for ages from 5 to 65.

Our mission is simple: through the provision of services, that offer care, friendship, stimulation and motivation, to help disabled people achieve their full potential – whilst giving families and carers much-needed respite.

We serve disabled people in the Portsmouth and south-east Hampshire areas with a range of different services that have been carefully designed based on user needs. As our users have grown with us we now find that we need to offer further services to meet their needs when their age or capabilities make them ineligible for our existing offerings. These are exciting times for us as we move into new areas such as work experience, job creation, supported volunteering and social enterprises.

We have a small core team of just 15 staff yet throughout the year we pay over 200 people to help run our services – supplemented by volunteers – and in this way we keep our overall support costs down to just 10% of our overall expenditure. A strong team of Trustees bring a wide range of industry skills to support the team, ensuring that overall governance is in line with standards expected by the Charities Commission, and giving support and mentoring to staff.

We receive funding from local authorities, the National Lottery, Children in Need and many other local benefactors whilst running fund-raising internally. But whilst we remain ‘Portsmouth’s Best Kept Secret’ then finding new sources of financial support will continue to be a challenge.

Thus we are now embarking on an awareness program within the area to help reach the hearts and minds of Portsmouth’s ‘Joe Public’ and its local enterprises. It’s going to take some time but we are committed to consigning our local invisibility to the trash can and truly come out of the shadows.

If you are part of the Portsmouth community and believe that together we must look after our own then please take some time to read our story, watch our videos and then perhaps follow or like our pages, or even give us a review….it all helps. If you are driving by in Copnor please drop by and meet with us; we would love to see you.

Thank you for reading our story.

Best wishes

The Staff and Trustees at Enable Ability.