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Educating for Affection
Educating for Affection
Start date: Jun 1, 2016,
End date: May 31, 2018
PROJECT
FINISHED
When you try to define a word “affection”, various synonyms appear next to it: love, friendship, caring, sympathy, kindness, closeness, desire, influence, and a good will. Today’s world is too complex and with all those new technologies and millions of new ideas born every day humanity is too busy to think about the issues around. Yet, more than a billion of people are believed to have some kind of disorder. That makes 1 out of 7 individuals you meet someone who could be left behind. This is a tremendous number. However, some still believe that love and kindness can save the relationships and sparkle the will to resolve these issues. A big desire to do this along with influence are the key to spreading this mighty mind-set.This is what NGO's are doing while working with children/youngsters with autism or another kind of disorder or some special need. Simply because those are humans too and anyone could appear in their place, this project wishes that volunteers could constantly provides support and care, showing sympathy and building up closeness. Social inclusion is a powerful act and mission as it turns differences and weaknesses into creative tools that empower cooperation and strengthens society. The most important objective is to promote welfare and quality of life of people with mental disorder of with special need.During the implementation of the project, volunteers will work in to different organizations, APPDA - Viseu and FAJUVIS to manage several activities and coordinates several services for the welfare of children/youngsters with autism and their families. In APPDA volunteers will work directly with the target group (children and youngsters) and in FAJUVIS they will work with applications for projects were this type of group will be included in future European projects applications and activities and also provide support to associations that integrate children/youngsters with special needs. For this we have developed several partnerships with strategic partners and we also provide support directly into schools for children with Special needs. Nevertheless, in order to achieve this social inclusion, especially with issues of societal status, nationality, abilities or race, the following activities are encouraged for our volunteers:- visiting orphanages with interactive programs;- attending old people’s house providing attention and gathering stories;- organizing social, engaging art events across the city that invite to share the passion of creation despite of skills or difference in ability;- providing care to animals in animal shelters not letting other beings to be left behind;- making open air/in-house movie nights on social topics, in particular short films; possible in partnership with local cinema and Youth Center;- launching unusual fundraising campaigns (for instance, Holi festival of colors; international 5K run/walk in traditional costumes of the world);- hosting Street Football tournament that will tackle marginalization;- starting volunteer tours across Dao region or even Portugal. Combining the actionable solution and optimistic mood, we shift the focus from the problem and rather provide an opportunity to achieve good results while doing something happily and creatively. Introducing volunteers to a variety of options, we make sure that they choose one or several actions they are willing to work with while having a great desire to do it. As the result, community of the town of Viseu will be improved, relationship will become even closer, new partners found, and more opportunities for youth to be engaged will be created while closing the gap between an average person and the one with any kind of physical or mental issue. After all, too many people have this problem for us to ignore it.