About ROFA

The Reclaiming Our Futures Alliance (ROFA) is an alliance of Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs) who have joined together to defend disabled people’s rights and campaign for an inclusive society.  ROFA fights for equality for Disabled people in England and works with sister organisations across the UK in the tradition of the international disability movement.  We base our work on the social model of disability, human and civil rights in line with the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).

Though ROFA receives no funding its members have been hard at work over the last couple of years.  Key work done includes:

• Organising the Rethinking Disability Policy Conference: September 2012 to discuss the lessons for the disabled people’s movement arising out of Jenny Morris’s Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) paper “Rethinking Disability Policy”. The priority message and action identified by the conference was the need to develop an effective grassroots UK wide network of DPOs that would create a united voice to tackle the onslaught on our rights by the coalition Government

• Development, launch and dissemination of the UK Disabled People’s Manifesto: Reclaiming Our Futures. September 2013. The “ROFA: Reclaiming Our Futures manifesto” – detailing issues and specific asks across all areas of disabled people’s lives – was developed by ROFA members in 2013 and launched at a lobby of Parliament attended by over 200 disabled people and MPs.

• UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) Shadow Report. Summer 2014 ROFA members collected statistics, reports and lived experience evidence from thousands of disabled people across England to collate an English Shadow Report in response to the UK report to the UNCRPD. We are currently working in a wider alliance of the representative DPOs in Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland, who are producing their own reports, to agree a UK wide set of questions for the UN to ask the UK Government when the UK is examined. The UK examination was due in spring 2015 but has been delayed and is now unlikely to take place until late 2016.

• Campaigning and Direct Action. ROFA members have been at the forefront of campaigning and direct action against the attacks on our rights including high profile actions in protest at the closure of the Independent Living Fund (ILF), supporting and initiating legal cases in relation to disabled people’s rights and independent living and protesting against ATOS and the Work capability Assessment

• Reclaiming Our Futures: what now for disability equality? Conference: July 2015. Attended by over 140 representatives from DPOs the conference developed a ROFA campaign plan for 2015/16 and formalised a ROFA Terms of Reference, membership criteria & process enabling ROFA to be clear and transparent about who it represents, what it works on and how it works.

To find out more about ROFA visit our website http://www.rofa.org.uk/