Charities are fighting to get those with learning disabilities hired – here’s how we can help

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Team Domenica is in essence a training centre and cafe where 21 people with learning disabilities acquire the skills – and with it the confidence and self-esteem – to lay and clean tables, serve customers and do the basics of hospitality. The thrilling prospect created by their work with Team Domenica – and other such social enterprises – is that they can emancipate charity from the interminable cycle of funding crises and applications that seems so often to be their fate. Social enterprises differ from charity in that they seek to raise revenues through means other than fundraising: for instance, charging people for a coffee made by someone called Domenica, who has Down's. In his wonderful new polemic, Charity Sucks – part of the Provocations series edited by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – the restaurateur Iqbal Wahhab argues that just such a model, marrying financial rigour with socially beneficial aims, will achieve the goal of charity work much more quickly.