In "The Search for The Holy Grail" project we involved 4 partners from Poland, Sweden, Northern Ireland and Italy. All of the organizations work with people with disabilities (intellectual disabilities, autistic, Asperger syndrome, deaf persons). We want to involve people with disabilities in creating the educational tool for staff. Our goal is to produce 4 movies and ebook created by people with disabilities. We want to ask them what is really important and a good example of working with them. We want them to be leaders of this process. In "The Search Fot The Holy Grail" we focus on that very moment when things actually change. That moment when you realise things will not be the same again. From now on, it will actually be better. In the project, “The search for the Holy Grail”, persons with intellectual disabilities will share those moments that has given them the opportunity to live a better and fuller life. Locating those specific moments, "The Holy Grails" and share the in an E-book and movies, will give us an idea of what we, the staff, should be looking for to offer persons with disabilities the possibility to lead a more complete life. All the materials will be available on the page of the project but also on pages of all partners and EPALE.
We had 2 goals. First, we wanted to empower the PWD with different kinds of disabilities. Give them a voice and created innovative educational tools – e-book and movies. Ensure that they are the main actors of the process and they are able to “educate” the staff. Tell them what is good and bad in the cooperation. Telling also what is important in their life in general but also in the small “daily routines” situations. The second group were the staff in the broader perspective: therapists, teachers, work coach, educators and also parents and member of the local communities. We think that one of the problems is that they are not so sensitive to the needs that PWD have. It's difficult to think about inclusion in regular daily activities and situations. Also getting to know what is really important for PWD can change the perspective. Important is the way to independence not “helping” them “doing something for PWD” even in the small activities. But that’s the process and our project was one of the steps that we wanted to do.
The project concentrated on 2 groups one were staff and other people with different kinds of disabilities. About the staff, we wanted to create a tool that is created by People with disabilities (PWD) that will show their “holy grail” moments in the relationship between the staff, therapist, teacher, work coach etc. But also concertized on the moments, and activities that change their lives for the better. In the project, we have people with different kinds of disabilities – people with intellectual disabilities, people with autism and deaf blind people. So we were able to create different perspectives about the relations and live goals. What was very important PWD was than main authors of intellectual outputs. They created scenarios for movies, and pictures, shoot videos, make music and were actors. PWD is still a group of people that are most excluded from social life in EU that's a big challenge for nowadays society. Improving the way of integration but also empowering PWD in their daily life was a task for our project. We can see that in organizations that support PWD sometimes staff are missing their motivation and need to support PWD in the correct way. We think that sometimes it's more important to change the mentality of staff than focus on PWD. Of course, that's a long process and through this project, we wanted to create a tool that will be helpful for PWD and staff.