Since 2010, BuDS has helped its volunteers towards work. Our Reach4Work project, created in 2018, codified and developed that help, creating a professional wrap-around service for our disabled volunteers who want to move into or closer to work.
BuDS is exceptionally successful at moving disabled jobseeker volunteers into or closer to work…
Please note that the BuDDies scheme is currently on hold due to ongoing challenges facing charity funding across England. Find out more at the button below.
Are you feeling lonely or stressed at home? Need a friendly chat with someone who understands? The BuDS BuDDies are here to help!
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BuDS publishes some of our articles in EasyRead format. These articles are produced by our volunteers, and so our capacity is limited. Over time we will publish more EasyRead articles. Please be patient with us whilst we grow this project.
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The BuDS Enquiries Team answers questions and queries from disabled people about a very wide range of issues. We try to fill the gaps left by other support services and helplines, so we often support disabled people with complex and difficult issues.
Any disabled person in England can contact the Enquiries project for help. Parents, carers, and supporters can also contact us on behalf of a disabled person. We don’t have strict rules about who we can help: we will always do our best to support you and will let you know immediately if, for any reason, we can’t.
The Enquiries project is staffed entirely by volunteers, many of them disabled people themselves. We are often very busy and there may be a delay in getting back to you. We are sorry about this, but we can only do so much. The Enquiries project is not a crisis or emergency service.
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The BuDS SEND Transitions Service is a three-year project funded by The Rothschild Foundation. The purpose of the SEND Transitions Service is to improve the experience of disabled children and young people moving through key transitions within school education and from school education into work or further/higher education. It will do this by:
The SEND Transitions Service is made up of workstreams from a number of BuDS projects, principally Fair4All Education and Reach4Work.
To learn more about the Reach4Work workstream, which is looking at disabled young people’s transition from education to employment, click here.
Fair4All Visitors is a BuDS project to help visitor attractions to be more accessible and inclusive for disabled people.
The Fair4All Education project tackles the most important educational issues facing disabled children and young people, and their parents/carers, in Bucks.
The core of the Fair4All Education project is a ‘working community’ of professionals, parents, carers and disabled young people who are passionate about making a real difference. Working under the BuDS umbrella, the Fair4All Education team works together to define an agenda for action and plan how change will be made to happen.
Read MoreDisabled people are often excluded from outdoor public events. This is not because they do not want to attend these events, but because the way the event is organized and staged creates barriers that make it difficult or impossible for them to attend. BuDS’ free-to-use Fair4All event project helps event organisers remove those barriers and attract more disabled people to their events, making them more successful. There are over 40,000 disabled people in Buckinghamshire and over 100,000 families with a disabled member, so being more accessible can significantly boost an event’s popularity and attendance.
Event organisers are often not aware that they are creating barriers which are reducing the appeal of their events. Event management training and qualifications do not usually cover disabled accessibility and inclusion. Disabled people are so used to events not being accessible that most do not even try to attend, which means event organisers do not see the difficulties that disabled people face.
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Disabled people are sometimes subject to abuse, insults or physical violence because of their disability. The BuDS Fair4All Attitudes and Hate Crime project supports people affected by disability hate, helps them report it to the police if they wish, and campaigns to change attitudes and combat hostility toward disabled people.
Read MoreThe IAG team works tirelessly to produce easy to read, fact-checked and reliable articles about issues relevant to disabled people. During the Covid-19 pandemic, these have included weekly risk posts which break down the latest case, hospitalisation, death and vaccination statistics; analyses of Government policy, and scientific updates about the coronavirus. To read these posts, please see below or visit our Facebook page using the button below:
If you would like to volunteer for the IAG team as a researcher or writer, please visit our volunteering page to find out more.
The Fair4All Card is a secure, evidence based card that can be used by any disabled person to communicate the reasonable adjustments they need.
We created the scheme in August 2020 and have grown from offering around 12 reasonable adjustments to now offering over 40.
Find out more about the scheme below.
Carers Bucks has given up its £4 million council-funded contract to support carers in Buckinghamshire. In a shock move, Carers Bucks decided not to re-apply for the contract, which has been awarded to Mobilise Ltd instead. While no formal announcement has yet been made, many observers fear that the Carers Bucks charity may now close later in the year.
Read more: Carers Bucks Gives Up Bucks Council ContractAll main councils in England are funded by the Government to commission services to support carers in their area. For many years, Buckinghamshire Council has given a contract to Carers Bucks, a local registered charity, to provide those services. From 1 July 2026, however, a private health entrepreneur, Mobilise Ltd, will be supporting Bucks carers instead.
Details of the service that Mobilise will provide in Bucks is not yet clear. However, Mobilise has the carers support contract for many councils, including Milton Keynes, Luton & Bedford, and the service provided there is primarily online. Carers in those areas can apply online for ‘dynamic digital carers’ assessments’ which creates an online ‘personalised support plan’. This is claimed to allow social workers to ‘proactively track a carer’s needs’ and help them to receive ‘continuous tailored support’. This digital, online, model, if rolled out in Bucks, would be very different from that provided by Carers Bucks, which is based on more traditional face-to-face and group support for carers.
Under contract and employment law, Carers Bucks will transfer information, paid staff and some resources to Mobilise Ltd when they take over. However, it is not clear whether activities, groups and volunteers provided by Carers Bucks outside their council contract will survive after 30 June.
Carers Bucks have said that its CareFest events in June will go ahead as planned. Billed as a celebration of carer friendly communities, the events may now be a bittersweet marking of the end of Carers Bucks’ long history in the voluntary sector in Bucks.
