Turkey

Spastic Children's Foundation

Multiplier Event in Istanbul on 2nd May 2019

The event was structured with the aim of empowering employees of the private sector in their  understanding of best practice methods in working with people with special needs. One of the fundamental questions posed at this this event was:

“How to sustain good working relations within the work space by empowering people with special needs?”

We mainly designed this event primarily for human resource departments but employees from other departments were also invited.

Interactive games were exercised throughout the event, aiding both the process of getting to know each other as well as summarizing key elements of the experience and creating awareness for the clients. Two small presentations were implemented by the organizing team.

One of them was for disability awareness (basic level, 101) and another one for presenting the project and Cerebral Palsy Turkey (what we do).

14:00 - 14:30 Introduction to Disability Awareness 101

First thing to do in order to increase disability awareness is to define differentness.  The term differentness points out the differences in humanized characteristics between people.

Individual, demographic and socio-cultural differences are not the source of the actual problem. On the contrary, these terms can be implemented to have a positive effect on equality and to counteract the discrimination, prejudice and exclusion of people with special needs.

ndividual and demographic differentness form developmental differentness. Our differentness might become a problem when there is no respect. However, we can define differentness as a natural phenomenon of a whole and functional society via active communication. For this reason, building on empathy and presenting new perspectives are essential in facilitating social acceptance of people with special needs within the working body as well as in the wider public.

15:15 - 16:45 Game Time

What was the focus and target of the game?

• To build empathy
• To raise awareness on disabilities by drawing attention to the opportunity gap
• To develop an understanding of personal outcomes as a member of any disability group

What did you mostly consider while you design roles for participants?

• For the purpose of the project, we decided to take into account theme of disability the most. In this manner, roles were divided into 3 groups. By doing that, we purposed to empower participants with wider perspective. In the first group, we had roles for people who are coming from different disability groups. For the second group, characteristics of people which have a strong connection with disabled people were taken into account. For the last group, roles for people who have no relation with disability and disabled people were on the cards.

• Besides, it was very important to not affect the participant in a negative way while we were creating the roles in order to raise the impact in the frame of the activity.

• Roles were designed mostly to reflect the realities from business life in order to widen the projects purpose.

• Our first target was to help the participant in order to make them questioning themselves in the frame of their role within the activity.

• The power of the activity lies on the impact which was created above the participants while the distance between them was getting larger. Therefore, statements were designed in order to increase the differences between participants.