About Us

Andover & District Mencap is a charitable company and this body corporate holds the assets on behalf of its members. The members elect its trustees who, on their behalf, use volunteers and employees to deliver benefits in accordance with its Articles and Memorandum. In other words, its members are the “owners” of the charity (who each have to fork out £1 if it fails!) and all others are enablers, tasked to deliver benefit to beneficiaries.

This fits well with the Charity Commission objective to ensure that charities are more accountable to their beneficiaries.

In practice the Board of Trustees takes input from the Members Forum and, following a careful evaluation, does its best to deliver what it can in the context of the legal and regulatory framework within which it must operate and the resources available to it. In other words it is as accountable to is beneficiaries as it can be given the environment in which it has to operate.

Andover & District Mencap has a long history of campaigning for people with a learning disability extending over 45 years. It has sought to relieve its members’ distress over this time and has kept itself aware of the latest developments in the education/health and social care environment throughout. Some developments have been ill thought through with unintended consequences and it has not been slow in pointing this out.

We are proud of our history, but we continue to reshape ourselves in order to be able to play a constructive part in the developments of the future, hoping to react quickly to prevent disastrous consequences for those that almost always fall down the cracks in government policy, public visibility and service delivery.