SAAMARTHYA

Saamarthya is dedicated to creating innovative public awareness campaigns, providing evidence-based professional development and advocacy resources to persons with disabilities, their families and professionals who work with them. Our mission is aligned with the UN SDG Goal 4, “Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (https://sdgs.un.org/goals/goal4). Saamarthya exists primarily to provide high-quality support and services to children with disabilities (with IDD and ASD) and their families. This means providing children with direct intervention services and group activities, individual counseling support, and group training to families.

Our Programs and Services:

1) Parent Training: The reality is that parents from smaller towns and cities in India often don't have access to high-quality training, particularly in their native language. We are dedicated to creating and delivering our training in Indian regional Indian languages so we can reach as many families as possible who can access the training without any language barrier. Through this program, parents are offered training, coaching, and mentoring to support their child’s needs at home. 100+ families, across India, benefitted from this effort last year. These programs are offered at no cost to families.

2) ASMI (direct interventions services): We provide 1:1 and small group instruction to children with ASD and IDD using Zoom. This work started in Feb 2022 and has been growing since then. Our one-on-one sessions are conducted online by our highly qualified special educators and offer personalized attention to each child's unique needs. This approach has proven effective in helping children with disabilities improve their academic and social skills, leading to better outcomes in school and life. Funding will allow us to continue our operations, hire additional special educators, and purchase the necessary equipment and technology to sustain and expand our reach. This program is offered at a very affordable cost to families, and using a sliding scale, we are also providing these services to many families pro-bono.

3) Club Ananda: Our therapeutic recreational club offers free programming to children. We enable learning opportunities twice weekly and have served 700+ children since 2021. Children engage in activities that develop their cognition, play, communication, language, and independent living skills. Parents who have enrolled in this Club express deep gratitude and satisfaction which fuels our motivation and passion further.

4) BLOOM App:
We are working to develop Bloom, a mobile application-based solution aimed at overcoming intervention inaccessibility challenges in rural parts of India. Bloom will leverage technology to provide offline intervention strategies, asynchronous parent coaching, and live 1:1 child intervention & parent coaching. We aim to make intervention and support accessible to all families, regardless of their economic background.