This new section of our website provides lots of advice and guidance for Disabled People wanting to setup a User-Led Organisation (ULO), or for Local Authorities wishing to facilitate the development of a ULO.

This page is being developed as quickly as we can, so come back to it reguarly and see what else we have added.

As one of the Department of Health’s ULO Action & Learning Sites during 2009/10, we have developed a range of ‘toolkits’ to help SCIL and other ULO’s improve the services we provide, increase the diversity of who we support and improve the sustainability of the ULO.

SCIL believes that ‘sustainability’ is more about human beings than money. All of our ‘toolkits’ have been developed to show how we have worked to improve SCIL and develop our individual personal development and our collective sustainability.

We hope you find the ‘toolkits’ below useful:

• LGBT Diversity Toolkit
• The research and development of a diversity toolkit focused on the LGBT community, but applicable to all 7 equality strands as identified by the Equality & Human Rights Commission. This product will be relevant to small ULO’s which will enable them to raise their awareness of the issues and develop a improvement plan.

• Supporting Carers
• A research based project to understand how ULO’s can develop a bettering understanding of the needs of Disabled People and the needs of Carers; and from this decide if and how they should support these different groups of people. The toolkit proposes a number of methods that this can be achieved.

• Decision Making in ULOs (Summary Report)
• Decision Making in ULOs (Full Report)
• This report and summary is the result of an in depth review by SCIL of how our different contituents are involved in the decisions that SCIL makes. This report provides a blue-print for SCIL’s improvement plan and a toolkit for other ULO’s to learn from.

• Building Sustainability Through Personal Development
  
• Sustainability requires investment in people: empowering new generations, providing opportunities that enable others to absorb the learning of previous generations, build confidence and skills incorporating their experience and to engage and develop the future. Here we undertake providing such an opportunity to: ensure SCIL’s future; learn; and share the learning.

• Becoming and Staying Tender Ready
• A Journey through the legislative framework that regulates procurement and informs tendering processes for public monies, with a view to supporting ULOs to make informed choices about tendering and considering how they might diversify their resource base, prepare for and bid for tenders.  Looking at local interpretation and creating a checklist.

• Website and Information Development for ULOs
• A learning project to find the most effective method of redesigning a ULO’s existing website. Project found more effective methods for developing and disseminating accessible information to Disabled People and other stakeholders, whilst at the same time finding methods to enable staff without specialist website training to maintain the site in future.

• Full Cost Recovery Toolkit
  
• This product assists new and evolving ULO’s to have a better understanding of how to do Full Cost Recovery when costing new projects or working out a ULO’s Core costs. The product takes advantage of SCIL‘s 25 years experience of average costs for our organisation.

SCIL Meeting Notification: 1st July 2010: SCIL Members, Staff & Volunteers Meeting to decide how to implement our User-Led Organisation recomendations to improve SCIL’s work

SCIL invites Members, Volunteers, Management Committee & Staff to decide how best to improve the work we do as a result of our recent ULO work. Download our invite letter and summary report below.

• ULO Meeting Invitation
• Summary of ULO Recomendations

More to follow…. real soon…make sure you keep coming back.