ABSTRACT
This chapter assesses the challenges to traditional charities posed both by the social model of disability and by the newly emergent Disability Movement. Traditional charities engage in a wide range of social activities including education, religion, sport, drama, hobbies and entertainment. The many traditional charities who subscribe to the medical model of disability specify their purposes in relation to one or a family of medically defined conditions. Non-disabled people’s sense of ownership of voluntary action is readily observed where traditional charities have sought to define terms such as ‘empowerment’ or ‘consumer participation’. Some traditional agencies are beginning to accept that they ought to promote disabled people into the higher echelons of their organisations. Welfare pluralism and the pre-eminence of the market-place in contemporary social policy has made another option available to the traditional charities, namely that they be transmuted into professional, mainstream service providers under contract to the state.
