KEEN

Who we are

KEEN is an award-winning national charity, born in Oxford in 1988 (some of our current participants have been with us for over 30 years!) and growing as guided by our incredible community.

We think that everybody should have an equal opportunity in life to make friends, get active, and enjoy a range of interests. We welcome participants with a very wide range of additional needs, including physical and learning disabilities, learning difficulties, and/or special needs.

Growing from our original sports sessions in 1988, we run in-person inclusive activities spanning everything from sports and games, to gardening to science experiments and performing arts. KEEN sessions are designed to be accessible, led by our participants interests and embracing fun and joy in all forms (time travelling dinosaurs anyone?). We have wonderful community partners who run inclusive workshops including trips to Oxford museums, workshops in Oxford Theatres and help us run our trips across the community (bowling, ice skating, swimming!).

Friendship shouldn’t be contained to just our sessions, and so our Community Buddies programme was born. We create 1-1 connections based on shared interests between individuals with and without additional needs. In our Oxfordshire branch, buddies meet up and do fun activities of their choice, from a trip to the cinema or a walk in the park, to joining a sports club together. Across the country, our buddies can meet on zoom to do activities of their choice – from chatting about their week, to quizzes to joining in KEEN’s programme of Virtual Zoom activities (Quizzes, Yoga, choir, baking, Storytime, talent shows and more).

All our participants deserve to be able to access their communities, exactly as the wonderful people they are. Our projects for inclusion grew from the ideas of our communities on difficulties they face in day-to-day life, and the ways they saw to address this.

Within Oxfordshire, this formed the Inclusive Oxfordshire project: working on making Oxfordshire a more inclusive and friendly place to live as a disabled individual. Our goals are centred around one principle, that accessible resources, opportunities, and sessions should be the norm not the exception. Current projects aim that people should be able to enter any public space (museums, libraries) knowing accessible information to suit them is available (Easy read, audio, large print, and more). That they could contact any club or team across the county knowing that there will be opportunities for disabled individuals whether at sports level, coaching or behind the scenes.

KEEN is powered by the enthusiasm, passion, and ideas of our community. Much of our community are young with ideas they wanted to bring to life, or passion for change and a request to learn how. Our Young Leaders Programme gives young people aged 16-19 to design and lead their own projects and Share One World Project showed us where young people aged 10 and up saw the future of inclusion – and how we could help them achieve it best. From coding projects, to requests to take what they’ve learnt and start new branches – KEEN is privileged to work with people who want to shape their communities. Our goal as a charity is to keep listening, keep learning and say, ‘how can we help?’

Our core value has and always will be: Everybody belongs at KEEN.