2023 Shortlisted Nominee
Community Organisation Award: Disability
Ability Today is an education platform for disabled people, providing unique access to courses in a way that allows students to excel and compete equally in the job market. They are levelling the playing field and creating brand new pathways to employment for the disabled community. Launched in 2014, Disability Today started out as an online news platform, becoming a not-for-profit Social Enterprise in 2017, and renaming to Ability Today in 2019 to send the message ‘Let’s focus on what we can do, not what we can’t!’. In 2020 they started an Academy for Disabled Journalists in partnership with the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ), providing a fully accessible course to their disabled roving reporter team. They now have over 80 students studying or passed their first qualification, with some now full-time journalists at the BBC, ITV News, and Newsquest.