empower parents -...
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EMPOWERPARENTS
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hablarenarte (nonprofit organization based in Madrid)
hablarenarte is an independent platform for projects that works to support the creation, dissemination and promotion of contemporary culture. Among its areas of action, hablarenarte promotes the curating of exhibitions and visual and performing arts events on both a national and international level; conceives and develops programs for educational and mediation programs, and cultural and social cooperation actions; disseminates national contemporary creation through publications, audiovisual media and international networks of professional cooperation. Education is a cross-cutting theme in all hablarenarte: projects.
We are currently managing, among other projects, Empower Parents, an educational community of families and professionals that seek to make an impact in the community in order to raise social awareness regarding the reality of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their families.”Curators’ Network”, a European network of young curators, and “Collaborative Arts Partnership Programme”, a transnational cultural programme focusing on the dynamic area of collaborative arts.
Laura Donis (director of hablarenarte)
Laura is a Social Worker, a postgraduate in family intervention programs and holds a Master in International Cooperation at the University of A Coruña (2008)
Expert in cultural mediation and management of social intervention programs. With more than 15 years of experience in the field of social action, she has worked in spaces of non-formal education and with different vulnerable groups, as well as coordinating international cooperation programs in different countries: Argentina, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador.She currently lives in Madrid and is involved in the direction of hablarenarte and the management of cultural programs applying his experience in the field of education and social intervention to the cultural scene by developing different programs at institutions such as. Museum ICO, La Casa Encendida, Matadero, La Casa del Lector or the Queens Museum of Art New York.
She is interested in applying the processes of community development in the cultural context, understanding the museum and the cultural institutions as community resources that should facilitate the accessibility to groups with special needs. The cultural scene understood as a democratic and inclusive space.
In this line, she develops since 2013 “Empower Parents” project, a network to provide parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) with tools and learning resources within museum environments, by establishing a cultural cooperation between the Queens Museum of Art New York, the Museum ICO and hablarenarte.
Empower Parents program
(The project started in 2013 between the Queens Museum (NY), the Fundación ICO and hablarenarte)
Empower Parents is an educational community of families and professionals working at the ICO Museum (Madrid) with hablarenarte. Through cooperative work among institutions, professionals and families, we seek to make an impact in the community in order to raise social awareness regarding the reality of people with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their families.
Empower Parents seeks to transform cultural institutions into social tools for facilitating the empowerment of families through their relation with culture and via concrete actions such as visits to museums and other cultural spaces as customary leisure activities. It is a co-directed experiential project that is being built in a collaborative way between families and professionals, the natural construction of an educational community that brings out the value of experience. The family is at the center of the project and plays the leading role as facilitators of the educational process.We want to promote new means of collaboration among administrations, organizations and professionals in order to share resources and generate a greater impact through the actions that come about related on diversity and inclusion in museums and other cultural settings.
As many other groups in a state of vulnerability, people diagnosed with ASD and their families are often invisible for the rest of the society. Even these families sometimes forget that, apart from schooling, it is also important to increase leisure and cultural activities. From Empower Parents we try fill this gap because we understand culture and creativity as tools that facilitate social changes and empowerment of invisible social groups That’s the reason why they must claim for their place in the society through the use of actions that allow them to gain visibility, to create a continuous social impact and to generate social awareness.
Empower Parents dreams on accessible societies that allows real inclusion of all different citizens. From Empower Parents’ community, we are working to get museums and cultural spaces to become more open, accessible and inclusive spaces for the community through the empowerment of the families.
Following that same strategy of impact on a community level, Empower Parents seeks to broaden this project’s base of indirect beneficiaries by developing adapted tech resources that facilitate autonomous visits to museums and cultural institutions by families with sons or daughters affected by ASD.
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More information:www.empowerparents.net
Presentation of “Empower Parents”La Aventura del saber”. Tve 2El acceso al arte. CNN Chile
