The Association of People with Disability
We are working with The Association of People with Disability (APD) to promote the inclusion of deaf children in families, communities and services in Bangalore and Kolar District.
APD is a registered NGO which was started in 1959 by a group of people with disabilities and has developed services covering areas of health, education, training, rural and urban community work to provide overall rehabilitation support to children and adults with all types of disabilities.
Until about five years ago APD concentrated its work with children and adults with physical disabilities. However surveys conducted over the years showed an alarming number of poor deaf children and adults unable to reach out to the very few services available for deaf people.
Project Aim
We will work together to develop the skills of APD staff, families and teachers to make sure that deaf children are included in all their existing projects and in community pre schools. Over 100 deaf children and their families will be involved in this project.
Project Activities
Urban Inclusion Activities (Bangalore) In Bangalore, we will work with children from the integrated primary school run by APD to support:
- Parents’ training programmes to enable parents to work at developing communication skills with their deaf children.
- Twice yearly informal vacation camps focusing on developing communication and language with the deaf child for parents and siblings
- Specific individual support in speech therapy and sign language for 25 children
- Training for teaching staff
Rural Inclusion Activites (Kolar District) These activities aim to ensure that rural service providers are able to include and support deaf children and their families.
- Training in language and communication development for CBR workers
- Regular home visits to support famliy and child’s language development and communication skills
- Training for pre-school and Anganwadi teachers who will include deaf children in their classes
- Awareness raising activities amongst mainstream teachers on the inclusion of deaf children
- Parent training workshops on developing communication skills
- Awareness raising activities for parents covering the rights of deaf children to education and other support and the importance of maintaining and using hearing aids.
- language and communication skills development training for young deaf people
- training workshops covering life skills, the rights of deaf people and advocacy
- training workshops on health and family life issues
- training for staff in career counselling for young deaf people.
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