Mr. Shrutarshi Banerjee lives in Kolkata, and if you are lucky enough to meet him, he will be introduced an entrepreneur, a manager, and a business partner. His life has changed so much from the days of pre-vocational class engagement that were not leading toward employment or other valued roles.
If you walk into the employment section of Autism Society West Bengal, you won’t hear the workers and trainees referred to as “our children.” You won’t see the walls jam-packed with donation plaques lauding all the generous benefactors, nor see all sorts of autism awareness and diagnostic posters on the walls. These examples are “red lights” that contribute to the people served being seen as forever children, charity burdens, or medical problems which need to be remedied. You will hear families referred to by their proper, respectful names rather than “Tarun’s Mom,” you will see the school section full of the sorts of school-typical décor and positive messages about learning, and the work section with messages you would expect a workplace to have. These are all “green lights” which encourage people to think of those served as full human beings and full fellow citizens.
Photo by Sujata Khanna Photography People with disabilities have often been seen and described as “those people” – and segregation and congregation increases the tendency to not only other such people, but to see them as a clump who are much the same as each other. One strategy which is taught within the framework of Social Role Valorization is to individualize services and supports, and that can start with our own mindsets and the mindsets of others (another powerful theme of our teaching).
Sudha Nair, a special educator and passionate activist from Pune, was struck by the potential of Social Role Valorization back in 2018. She recently attended the four-date deep dive at SRV 3.0 and has put her sharp mind to the task of trying to relate Individualized Education Plans (IEPs) to a meaningful planning process for competency enhancement. She first explored the difference between a document intended to be a roadmap to accomplish goals and a living process that frames a roadmap for a person.
One of the areas in which Social Role Valorization sharpens our eyes is noticing the power that language has to convey negative or positive messages about people. Dr. Raheemuddhin Pk, psychologist and leader at CDMRP within the University of Calicut, attended a four-day intensive SRV workshop and immediately realized that in the many training courses he teaches to professionals, the language was highly medical in nature.
The Ashish Center, under the founder Geeta Mondol and the current Director, Sheila George, has taken the implementation of both person centered practice and Social Role Valorization forward in a steady arc with one strong strategy after another. Over time, we will cover several of these strategies in more detail, but for this Glimpse, we’ll look at just one. It should be said that Ashish was an early adopter. Their leader attended the inaugural SRV workshop, senior staff have attended, and families and board members have all been exposed to the ideas.
Prayatna is a small organization in Pune, Maharashtra, dedicated to supporting adults and children with developmental disability. Founding partners Radiya Gohil and Mridula Das attended the inaugural Social Role Valorization course in 2016 in Delhi, and were struck with the concept of assisting people who have been often over-controlled and over-protected to maximize their personal autonomy and be “in the driver’s seat” of their lives.