Owais Niaz is Co-founder of Vision Ability, a community interest company (CIC) founded and run by Visually Impaired people for Visually Impaired people. This month we caught up with Owais to hear about why he founded the CIC, and the practical work they do helping the visually impaired, as well as the vital work the do to raise awareness of visual impairment and disability more generally.

What does your charity do?
Vision Ability is a community interest company founded and run by Visually Impaired people for Visually Impaired people. Alongside my brother Shahab and our friend Luqmaan, we established our organisation at the start of 2021. Having all been through our own journey of sight loss and neurodiversity, we run the company using our own experiences to add value to our services.

Our individually tailored one-to-one services include Form Filling support for Benefit Applications, IT training, Career Advice, Travel Confidence, and the organisation of Sports and Social Events. On a grander scale, we visit schools, bringing interactive and engaging presentations to classrooms and assembly halls. Through this style of education, we can increase Disability Awareness, Combat Bullying and tear down social stigma and exclusion. We also emphasise the importance of regular eye testing to prevent avoidable blindness and collaborate with the borough’s local optometrists, prompting them to offer discounted eye testing incentives for the whole family.

What are the challenges your service users face, and how does your organisation help users overcome them?
Sense reported in 2021 that 70% of disabled people felt isolated, so we are tackling this staggering figure. At Vision Ability we believe in the social model of disability over the medical model, and that empowerment is essential to those being marginalised by society due to their disability. It is society’s responsibility to change. We are showing our service users how to adapt to and utilise the tools available around them to live a more independent and fulfilling life story. Stepping on a bus seems so simple to many, but for others that step could be life-changing.

We offer tailored one-to-one support for individuals including technology workshops on things such as iOS and Microsoft accessibility features and UX training. Having the ability to use a smartphone or laptop can open a whole new world of possibilities. With disability employment rates on the decline, this financial uncertainty can impact areas such as housing, health and happiness in people’s lives, but we can work with individuals in many ways to enable them to reach their true potential.

Do you have an inspirational story/moment about your work that you would like to share?
One of our Service Users had been offered a job position with RNIB, but was missing accessibility aids and training to carry out the role. After a few hours of focused IT training, we helped them build their skills, but also their confidence. They are now happily employed with clear career development ahead of them. This is just one of the cases of using our lived experience to empower and enable others. Having done it ourselves (at times the hard way!), we now strive to enable our peers to do the same as best we can.

What kind of support are you in need of right now and how might volunteering fit into that?
We are incredibly fortunate to have come so far. We started on our own, fuelled by our need to be creative and give back to our community, but also thanks to some truly inspiring people and organisations who believed in us. However, as our organisation is growing, we are realising that we need better structure and planning.

Hence, we are seeking consultancy advice on planning, structuring, safeguarding and, overall, a business health check to ensure we are on a robust and resilient path. At a recent Business Planning Workshop organised by ELBA we realised that we have been following a “survival of the fittest” approach, instead of a Managed Evolution. We want to be better organised and prepared, so we don’t want to let anything, or anyone, slip past us!