On Friday, March 22, from 3:45 p.m. at the municipal council chamber of Rome's District XII, Via Fabiola 14 (Monteverde Nuovo), the nonprofit Vedere Oltre will host a workshop: The Adult with Intellectual Disability: Has Growth Come to an End?
The workshop speakers include Paola Baccetti (Pedagogue), Claudia Condoluci (Pediatrician, IRCCS San Raffaele), Giovanna Orsini (Psychologist and Psychotherapist, IRCCS San Raffaele), and Mariano S. Pergola (President of Vedere Oltre). Admission is free.
The workshop is organized in collaboration with the Disability Advisory Board of District XII, with support from the nonprofit Friends of Giorgio Albertini Association, and under the patronage of District XII.
Statement from the organizers:
The aim of Vedere Oltre's workshop series is to present initiatives, best practices, and significant themes across the different areas of life for people with disabilities and their families. Disability, though a profound wound, cannot and must not become an excuse for complaint, sentimentality, passivity, or a pretext for the provision—or expectation—of prefabricated support measures that are often partial and inadequate to real needs.
We believe instead that constructive initiatives, ideally original ones, and above all those grounded in concrete analysis of existing resources and constraints—particularly economic and cultural ones—enable the agencies that interact with these families in various capacities, working together with the families themselves and in coordination with one another, to build their dignity, their bargaining power, their authority. In doing so, we set in motion a virtuous cycle aimed at increasing personal and collective well-being.
The eighth workshop, scheduled for the afternoon of March 22, 2019, takes up the theme of continuous growth in adults with intellectual disabilities. The title ends with a question mark: Is growth in people with intellectual disability merely a hope, a wish—or is it a realistic goal we should actually pursue?
We believe that every person with intellectual disability, whatever its severity, shares with all other human beings the same fundamental needs and, with adequate support, the same desires: meaningful relationships, the dynamic flow of life's events, affection, the chance—insofar as it is possible—to imagine, to represent themselves, and why not, to envision and plan for the future, to achieve goals even if modest by conventional standards and limited in scope. In short, a life of genuine quality, rather than permanent stagnation until death—a death often preceded by a parent's despair at the thought of leaving a disabled child behind.
What barriers so often make it difficult to secure a truly human quality of life for adults with disability? This workshop aims not only to prompt reflection, but also to offer some answers to this question.