A three day seminar on support and rehabilitation of children with developmental disabilities and their families was held in Irkutsk. Experts from Moscow met with parents and specialists, shared modern approaches, and discussed creating a unified social support system in the region. After the round table, it was decided to form such a system in Irkutsk and create an information and rehabilitation center.

This issue was discussed at the seminar “Providing informational, consulting, and methodological support to socially oriented non-profit organizations in the regions of Russia in the field of rehabilitation, education, and integration of persons with various developmental disabilities,” held from November 11 to 13 in Irkutsk.
As part of it, meetings were held with parents, representatives of parent public organizations, a seminar for specialists from the Angara region, “Modern Approaches to Supporting a Child with Developmental Disabilities and His Family,” and a roundtable discussion, “Creating a System of Social Support in the Irkutsk Region for Children with Intellectual Disabilities and Families with Children with Multiple Disabilities.”
The seminar was initiated by the city charitable foundation of the local community, “Heritage of Irkutsk Philanthropists.” Three specialists from Moscow were invited as the main experts for the three-day seminar: expert in the education and adaptation of children with multiple developmental disabilities, director of the regional charitable public organization “Center for Curative Pedagogy” Anna Bitova, her deputy Alexandra Fadina, and the center’s educational psychologist Dmitry Ermolaev.
“This year saw an important event for our society – in May, Russia ratified the International Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities,” said Anna Bitova, director of the regional charitable public organization “Center for Curative Pedagogy.” “This is important because we will become more actively involved in the process of creating a comfortable life for people with developmental disabilities.”
More than 13,000 children with disabilities live in the Irkutsk Region, of whom nearly 3,200 are in Irkutsk. More than 10 public non-profit organizations in the regional center work successfully with children with disabilities.
“This is my first time in Irkutsk,” Anna Bitova said. “My colleagues and I visited the adaptation and pedagogical center ‘Pribaikalsky Talisman,’ the public organization ‘Nadezhda,’ and other state and municipal institutions engaged in the upbringing of children with severe intellectual disabilities. You provide fairly comprehensive assistance designed for different ages. There are still delicate issues, there are problems with school accessibility for children with severe disabilities, but I think those can also be resolved. We told your specialists about new methods and ways of working with children with disabilities, showed video materials, and hope that work will begin in Irkutsk with such categories of children who are not yet receiving sufficient assistance. But it should also be said that if we look at the situation in Russia as a whole, then Irkutsk is one of the best.”
As a result of the roundtable held on November 12, a decision was made to create a unified system in Irkutsk for supporting families with children with special needs.
“The main goal of the work we are carrying out is to begin gradually building a system of support for families with children with special needs. One of the first steps is the creation of an informational and rehabilitation center that would serve as a kind of unifying foundation for such a large effort,” said Marina Kondrashova, chair of the board of the city charitable foundation of the local community “Heritage of Irkutsk Philanthropists.”
Based on materials from the press service of the Irkutsk city administration