Community Rehabilitation Programme
About Satya Special School
The Satya Special School helps any person with intellectual disabilities, irrespective of the degree or kind of disability, socio-economic condition, age or gender. The objective of the school is to eradicate the stigma associated with disabilities, especially intellectual ones. By empowering children, making them confident and self-reliant, the school helps improve their quality of life through better health care and individualized rehabilitation programmes. Today, with the help of 106 staff members, Satya Special School is pioneering a number of unique initiatives in the Union Territory of Pondicherry. Currently, the school caters to over 764 children with special needs through various services. The organization functions from four urban and three rural centres.
Read more about the school: http://www.satyaspecialschool.org
Chetak Travels & Satya Special School
Chetak has been associated with Satya Special School since 2010. Over the past years, Chetak has worked with various organizations/clients to promote the welfare of handicapped children. Chetak’s philosophy towards its clients is more than just providing travel services: we facilitate/help our travellers invest in meaningful projects that benefit society at large. At Chetak, we are proud to have helped in various such projects to date.
In June 2010, Satya Special School (SSS) launched the Community Rehabilitation Programme in collaboration with CIAI (Italian Centre for Inter Country Adoptions). The main objective of this programme was to provide health and education services to Children with Special Needs. The emphasis was to identify those children who were deprived of basic education, due to either their degree of disability or their lack of financial resources. The objective was achieved through two unique programmes: (1) setting up village rehabilitation centres for children capable of attending day schools (2) providing mobile rehabilitation services (such as physiotherapy, speech/occupational/play therapies and special education) for those not able to attend day schools. The most important aspect of rehabilitation in both these projects was to make the children as independent as possible. More than 75% of the children have shown improvement in both their physical and academic skills, thanks to this programme.
Chetak’s Value Addition
A Swiss couple, living in the outskirts of Pondicherry, was instrumental in setting up this project. However, to scale it up, additional funding was required. Through the founder of SSS, the directors of Chetak were made aware of this project. After speaking and coordinating with various international organizations, Chetak enabled the required additional funding for this project. In addition, Chetak handled 70+ international volunteers from Santander Bank and The Body Shop Foundation (UK) that came to India to build an important part of the facility (i.e. Rehabilitation Centre at Kodathur). It now serves as a unique integrated facility providing free services and is the only village centre that offers hydrotherapy. It serves as a model for providing quality rehabilitation services to CWSNs.