Liberdade Community Development Trust

Liberdade (Lib-er-dar-jie) is a theatre company founded to give a group of people with learning disabilities the opportunity to run their own organisation. Since 2003 we have championed long-term engagement and given a voice to the learning disabled community. Liberdade has a soul, it cares for people and pushes them to excel, it always goes above a beyond and doesn’t know the meaning of can't. People come to Liberdade to work, to train others, to expel old misconceptions but mostly to belong. We work in partnership with independent and statutory organisations delivering training, social enterprise support, research, film production, workshop delivery and take part in regional and national events representing the learning disabled community. We work with key partner organisations regionally and nationally to address significant issues around social exclusion, arts development, employment and discrimination faced by the learning disabled community. Liberdade now runs Gosforth Civic Theatre, it’s a theatre, an events venue, a cinema, a gallery and a Café but what’s important is why we opened the building. “We wanted to provide something for the community, instead of it being the other way around… here people can see that we’ve got skills, that we can be useful.” Ed, company member If you watch this short film https://vimeo.com/239474453 our company members paint a much clearer picture of what we do, how we do it and why.