In your own view, what challenges does your project address?
Empower Parents dreams on accessible societies that allows real inclusion of all different citizens. From Empower Parents’ community, we are working to get museums and cultural spaces to become more open, accessible and inclusive spaces for the community through the empowerment of the families. Following that same strategy of impact on a community level, Empower Parents seeks to broaden this project’s base of indirect beneficiaries by developing adapted tech resources that facilitate autonomous visits to museums and cultural institutions by families with sons or daughters affected by ASD.
In how far do culture and creativity contribute to your project’s innovative and inclusive character?
As many other groups in a state of vulnerability, people diagnosed with ASD and their families are often invisible for the rest of the society. Even these families sometimes forget that, apart from schooling, it is also important to increase leisure and cultural activities. From Empower Parents we try fill this gap because we understand culture and creativity as tools that facilitate social changes and empowerment of invisible social groups That’s the reason why they must claim for their place in the society through the use of actions that allow them to gain visibility.
Please describe the transformative potentials of your project and explain its innovative character.
Empower Parents seeks to transform cultural institutions into social tools for facilitating the empowerment of families through their relation with culture and via concrete actions such as visits to museums and other cultural spaces as customary leisure activities. It is a co-directed experiential project that is being built in a collaborative way between families and professionals, the natural construction of an educational community that brings out the value of experience. The family is at the center of the project and plays the leading role as facilitators of the educational process.
Empower Parents is nominated for this year's NICE Award. All shortlisted projects can be seen here.