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West Berkshire Mencap
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West Berkshire Mencap puts clients with learning disabilities at the heart of eBay for Charity
- West Berkshire Mencap has started an innovative programme to teach clients with learning disabilities how to run online auctions on eBay. While most charities use eBay for Charity to raise funds, West Berkshire Mencap has secured funding for a new programme to teach people to use online auction sites, boosting confidence and providing a sense of achievement, while developing IT skills and raising funds.
- Leila Ferguson, CEO of West Berkshire Mencap, said: “We talk regularly to our members so that we can provide services that they have asked for. eBay is known to so many of them and has created such an interest that we realised this was a course that would be of value for many reasons. It attracts funding, enables people to learn a subject of great importance to them which also provides accredited qualifications.”
- The charity has secured financial support to run the programme from the local authority’s Community Education Fund, and hopes to get the course accredited through the Open College Network.
- West Berkshire Mencap aims to ensure that its clients enjoy opportunities and challenges, and learn new and important skills. Having discovered real enthusiasm among clients for online auctions, West Berkshire Mencap set up the training programme to help them get more out of the process.
- The training programme will include ten modules, from learning how to use websites through to parcelling up items that have been sold. The first group of six clients will be starting the programme this Autumn.
- Since the sellers will be using West Berkshire Mencap’s eBay for Charity account, all the profits – and eBay’s fees – will go straight back into the charity’s services for disabled people.
"Besides the new funds raised through our eBay uction, the profile of the charity has been raised immeasurably through eBay for Charity. We're still riding the wave!" — Claire Newman, Development Office, Books Abroad