Introduction

 

To a child with a disability, or equally, to a gifted child, the right technology in a classroom can enable them to take on the world. I, for one, know that I would have been much more confident in my learning had I been able to personalize work in the way my students do. Wraitmell (2021)

 

Background and Overview

At-Risk special families are comprised of one or more individuals with a disability. There are limited educational and employment opportunities for special needs students, and the socio-economic burden on these parents, some of whom are forced into unemployment, is exorbitant in Barbados and across the region.

Lifelong Skills Training Inc. is an NGO and has been in existence since 2018 working on the behalf of and advocating for the disabled youth and their families in our community. We are a family centred Centre seeking to support the child with special needs entering adulthood and their families through a multi-faceted approach.   We provide them with a continuing free education in Skills Training, Life Skills and Self-help skills to ensure that they live full and productive lives. Our staff is taken from our unemployed parent population. We care for 51 families and operate out of the Ann Gill Methodist Church from 7:00 am until 2:00 pm during the academic year.

At Lifelong the focus has been contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations that we, Barbados, signed on to, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11and 17.  The primary goals are tackling poverty, hunger, free education, providing decent work and health and well- being of the family unit, building sustainable communities and reducing inequalities. We differ from other programmes because the Directors took out business loans to invest in providing youth with disabilities with free continuing education and skills as well as employing the parents.

Our social experiment and model have proven that home- grown solutions to our social problems can work. In our pilot project, we took our staff from amongst our parent population, thereby tackling the whole idea of lifting parents of youth with disabilities out of poverty. We provide all students and accompanying parents with a free breakfast and a hot meal provided by the Salvation Army every day thereby tackling hunger. We employ parents forced out of the labour force, with the requisite qualifications to teach the students Masonry and Tiling, Sewing, Life Skills, Lawn maintenance and now agriculture to be followed by car valeting. Our plan is to provide our families with nutritious ground provisions and improving the health and longevity of this malnourished population. We also have a strong fitness programme to encourage a healthy lifestyle amongst students and parents.

We have successfully landed a subvention from government to cover operational expenses and a project allocation with a local Trust to fund a mini-mart and grocery bag project to create a sustainable job market for some of their youth. There are three Directors, we  employ 5 full time teachers and 6 part-time staff and ancillary workers. Autism Mom is one of the directors and founding members.

 

Purpose of digital strategy

Some At- risk youth and their families, who would benefit from this type of model and the programmes the centre offers  

• ·     do not know it exists
• ·         cannot access it because of either the nature of their disability, transportation issues or location.

 Lifelong, therefore faces several serious constraints such as

•  delivering accessible, free education to all youth with disabilities remotely. 
• being able to disseminate the fact that this model of family centered learning married to parent employment, works and this is why we need an effective digital Strategy. 
• An effective digital strategy will allow us to reach disconnected youth and families remotely and share how this model can change their futures whether they are citizens here or in other countries.

 

Vision

Lifelong commits to the development of an effective digital strategy which will allow for the digital dissemination of information about our model and how it works and how to get started with establishing your own, as well as a range of online educational videos based on the programmes offerings for those youth who are restricted by mobility issues, transportation issues or location. We want our special youth to be able to take on the world.