CENTRE "LIVING UPRIGHT" INITIATES PEER COUNSELLING CENTRE FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH WITH DISABILITIES, THEIR PARENTS AND CARETAKERS
In March, 2010, the Centre "Living Upright" initiated a peer counselling centre for children and youth with disabilities, their parents and caretakers with the support from the parents who provided the initial funding for its activities.
Starting from 1 December the project has been funded by the Balkan Fund for Local Initiatives through the Social Transition Programme.
The purpose is to create a counselling centre based on peer, experience-based approach as a precondition for a team perception of family situations, organising family meetings or meetings aimed at finding the best solutions, timely noticing and encouraging social capacities and participation of young people with disabilities and their responsibility for their own life and their contribution to their community, creating a possible model of counselling support for children and young people with disabilities, where young persons with disabilities are the initiators and owners of the process, and their expansion to other municipalities in Vojvodina, and contributing to preventing the isolation of children and young persons with disabilities and their families and deinstitutionalisation.
The activities are carried out on working days between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m., and include individual and group work in the premises of the Centre, home visits to the users, and counselling and educational activities in schools that the children and young people with disabilities and other marginalised groups attend.
The counsellors and all those who address the counselling centre have the same or similar experience. They are young persons, parents and experts with or without disabilities: peer educators, youth workers, psychologists, pedagogues, an expert in charge of working with families (a defectologist and family therapist) and a jurist, and we expect to cooperate with all the organisations and services in our city that offer services aimed at children and youth, and that children and young persons with disabilities and their families turn to for help.
The most frequent reasons for addressing our Centre so far have been related to school enrollment since the positive innovations brought by the implementation of the Law on foundations of the education system. Thanks to the intervention of the Counselling Centre, eleven children have started attending regular school, 6 schools on the territory of the South Bačka District have organised a pedagogical assistance service, three young users and five parents have joined the activities of the Centre and the movement of persons with disabilities. During the past year, for all of these activities, we have established cooperation with the Vojvodina Association for Help to Persons with Autism and several organisations that represent the interests of persons with intellectual disabilities. Two trainings have been organised for persons with intellectual disabilities and their families in order to develop self-advocacy skills, one of which, the one focused on acquiring knowledge about the rights and sexuality - aimed at independent decision making, is ongoing.