Dzerzhinsk’s social workers received training on how to work with children with disabilities

23 march 2023

On March 20-22, experts from the Markhamat Charitable Educational Foundation (Republic of Bashkortostan) taught a training course to employees of social institutions and non-profit organizations in Dzerzhinsk. This professional development program is a product of cooperation between the foundation and ParaPlan, a non-profit association of disabled wheelchair users, under overall organizational support provided by SIBUR's Formula for Good Deeds social investment program.

Since 2016, we have supported more than 150 inclusive projects under the Formula for Good Deeds program. We are happy to note that our grantees and partners under interregional projects are developing peer-to-peer connections with their colleagues in the other regions where SIBUR operates. I am sure that the competencies acquired by our trainees will come in very handy in their daily activities, Elena Snezhko, head of the Formula for Good Deeds social investment program, commented.

The training course focused on how to best interact with children with disabilities and featured instructional modules on diagnosing children’s psychological and learning abilities, on developing their cognitive abilities, on communication and speech abilities, on self-regulation and interhemispheric interactions, on sensory integration, and on development of creativity.

Thanks to the support of the Absolute Help Foundation as part of the project titled "Accessible Education: Systematizing and Replicating the Experience of Interacting with Children with Disabilities", we now have the opportunity to share our experience with our colleagues in other Russian regions. Each course’s curriculum is developed based on the specific requests of our partners, as we aspire to take into account all the expectations of our courses’ participants. The class in Dzerzhinsk was attended by very enthusiastic people who are really interested in the topic of character development, which is always particularly gratifying, Anna Vasilyeva, Deputy Head for Methodology at the Markhamat Charitable Educational Foundation, commented.

A total of 16 people got through the training. Each participant of the class will receive a state-issued continued professional development certificate.

We met the leaders of the Markhamat Foundation at an inclusive forum in Ufa at the end of last year. It's really great that we were able to arrange this class so quickly. These days, online learning and distance learning programs are experiencing a boom. But the subject of working with children with disabilities requires face-to-face interactions with the instructors and there’s a need for performing practical exercises. That’s why it was so important to be able to put together this class in Dzerzhinsk and to invite experts from the Foundation to teach it, Mikhail Chetvertakov, the head of ParaPlan, a non-profit association of disabled people confined to wheelchairs, and an expert of the Formula for Good Deeds social investment program, noted.

We recently created an adaptive department at our Sports Palace, and so now we're going through a development phase. That's why this professional development program was so relevant as we are working on developing programs for children with various disabilities. For me personally, the most valuable thing in this training was to learn about the current trends, ways and methods of working with special needs children, Denis Bocharov, an adaptive sports instructor and methodologist at the Yunost Palace of Sports who had come to take the training course all the way from Nizhny Novgorod, commented.