Independent Training Program
The program was developed with the purpose of preparing adolescents and young adults with cerebral palsy and developmental disabilities for functional independence and permanent housing in the community. The program is implemented in training apartments adapted for people with disabilities. The participants spend two evenings a week in the apartments, with special transportation, coming straight from their school or daycare/work frameworks and receive guided activity from our professional team as part of their training towards functional independence and becoming an autonomous person. The elder participants stay overnight and return to their frameworks the following morning.
Through the activities at the training apartment the participants practice real life operations and decision making while maintaining a house, such as: buying groceries and preparing meals, cooking, washing dishes, laundry, cleaning the house, managing a bank account, paying bills, etc., actions that are obvious to most people but require tremendous effort and constant practice for people with disabilities. The time spent in the apartments, while making decisions, allows each of the participants to enhance their social skills, participate actively in managing a household and exercise real independence.
Over the years of operation, a significant number of participants acquired tools that enabled them to advance to the next step – community housing. Those who were not able to manage independent living stayed in their family’s home but became actively involved in the managing of their day-to-day life.
The program is based on the Conductive Education approach that believes that people with disabilities have the ability to change and acknowledges that new abilities can be achieved with learning rather than being dependent on existing abilities. The innovation of the program derives from its understanding that the participants’ disabilities face them with learning disabilities. The program helps them overcome their disabilities in their home and school environments as well as in various community settings.
Tsad Kadima operates two training apartments, in Jerusalem and Rishon Letzion, with some 80 adolescents and adults with cerebral palsy and developmental disabilities.
Tsad Kadima’s frameworks are supervised and partially financed (approximately 75%) by the Israeli Ministries of Education, Welfare and Health. However, the Independence Training Program is entirely sustained on parental fees and donations. We invest great efforts in raising funds for this important program since it offers its participants an unusual and exceptional opportunity of experiencing independence and gaining faith in their capability to cope with independent life in the community.