The monitors (professionals and volunteers) who deal with disabled youngsters during their leisure and meeting activities are confronted with the fact that they do not have enough abilities and knowledge to handle in a qualitative way situations in which the disabled youngster also demonstrates difficult behaviour. A major factor is the limited cognitive ability of some disabled youngsters which can complicate the communication. If the behaviour issue is not resolved, the youngster often shuts him/herself out of the group, and this counteracts the inclusion, which is the purpose of these leisure and meeting activities. This failure is also frustrating for the monitors, of whom some offer part of their free time for these disabled youngsters. The objective of this project is to present operational strategies and abilities to these monitors in an effort to offer more possibilities to handle the difficult behaviour of disabled youngsters more adequately. If the monitors find the right approach to handle the situations of difficult behaviour in a better way, the social inclusion of these disabled youngsters will improve. This will increase the level of happiness for the disabled youngsters and for their monitors. Some disabled youngsters show sometimes this difficult behaviour by verbal aggressiveness, pulling of hair, inflicting wounds on themselves, demonstrating asocial behavior, etc. These youngsters experience great obstacles to create a social network and great difficulties to obtain social inclusion. Professionals and volunteers of youth organizations do not have sufficient answers on the best way to reach out to these youngsters to obtain positive effects in obtaining social inclusion. Strategies to handle difficult behaviour exist, but they are generally directed towards youngsters without cognitive disability. This project wants to review the available strategies, select four strategies which might be suitable for disabled youngsters and applicable by the monitors, and apply each selected strategy in a structured manner during a test period of 3 months. The selection criteria will include: expected efficiency, relatively easy to pick up in a short period, geared towards disabled youngsters, and being sufficiently operational. The involved 40 monitors and 2 coaches will receive a training to become proficient in the strategy which they will apply. The experiences of the monitors on the strategy which they have applied will be collected. They will apply a scientifically validated measuring scale to evaluate their experiences in relation to the feasibility and efficiency of the tested strategy. The project will study strategies from 2 Polish and 2 Belgian experts and involve for each strategy 5 Polish monitors and their coach and 5 Belgian monitors and their coach. This international exchange will allow the introduction of the best influences of West-European and Central-European cultures in this delicate field, and this will enrich the outcome of this project. The project will analyse the results in an effort to reach end conclusions which strategies are best manageable and provide the most positive influence on the difficult behavior of the disabled youngster. We will distribute these results through workshops and information channels such as website, printed publications, etc., and also through a symposium at the end of the project. This symposium will include workshops, which will be offered to professionals and volunteers who work with disabled youngsters in leisure and meeting activities, to train them in the selected strategies. The impact to monitors will be significant since they will have expanded their resources how to handle the situations in which the disabled youngsters acts up his/her difficult behaviour. Youth organizations, which deal with disabled youngsters or which make an effort to integrate disabled youngsters in their operation, search for adequate ways to influence positively youngsters with difficult behaviour.The results of this project will support these youth organizations in their search for a suitable strategy which can help the disabled youngster and which can support him/her in their aspiration for social inclusion.
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