The Project

HOPE PROJECT OBJECTIVES AND ACTIVITIES

The Hope Project was designed to reach, inform, assist and motivate parents to insure that their disabled children get appropriate help and get it as early as possible, thereby giving them a much greater chance of taking their rightful place and playing their part in society.

This is still the mission of the group. However since our establishment we have been inundated with requests for help from parents of children within the autistic spectrum. Our most active members spend hours every week on the phone with parents of mentally handicapped children. While trying to cope with these urgent requests, we accelerated our efforts to gather information which would be helpful to parents and their children. We have made a deliberate effort to inform ourselves attending conferences, studying, discussing, and consulting various experts.

We became increasingly alarmed by the sheer number of local children being diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders and began to suspect that we had a possible cluster of autism in the Cork area. Last summer, with the help of a volunteer medical student , we formulated a questionnaire and interviewed parents of autistic children. Our initial findings from this anecdotal survey were alarming. We discovered that many of these children are doing very poorly. In general, parents felt their children were not receiving appropriate or effective medical, psychological, therapeutic or educational services and for the most part though the parent is very worried about their child's situation, they don't know what would help their child and therefore what to ask for or who to ask. We were also impressed with the diversity of needs in the surveyed group. In many ways autistic persons are far more diverse than the common label would lead someone to imagine.

We decided that a concerted effort was needed to establish an effective early intervention service. We guided a group of parents of young autistic children in a successful effort to have preschool classes using a form of Applied Behaviour Analysis (CABAS) established which would include a teacher training facility for future classes in other parts of the country. This effort was successful, the classes opened last month. We are now in touch with medical consultants in Dublin and Cork in an effort to alert them to the developments in the medical basis of autism. We hope to ensure that medical help will be available to autistic persons in Ireland in the near future.

We have met with officials in the Department of Health and have kept in touch with this Department. We have also met with the Minister for Education on several occasions and are encouraged with the response.

Last summer, we helped to publicise a seminar held in UCD and organised by AiA, an English group devoted to fostering medical research and providing information of medical issues in autism. This summer, we held our own seminar on these issues to inform parents and educate professionals about effective medical/dietary strategies in autism. We had planned to hold a second day of seminars on educational I therapeutic strategies in autism but lack of funds prevented this.

The situation as regards autism has become so severe that that we find ourselves spending the bulk of our time and effort on this spectrum unfortunately limiting the outreach to children suffering from other disabilities. A newly diagnosed autistic child has no time to spare. It is vital that we are able to reach new parents with a message of hope and help. The interventions in autism are most effective in the first years however without guidance most parents spend these early years fumbling in the dark and the later years in regret. Though we are available to parents of autistic people of all ages and parents of children suffering from other mental handicaps, the Hope Project seeks especially to provide the information and assistance in the first years of autism while it can significantly effect the outcome for the child. Autism is a growing problem and the demand on our service is also growing fast both locally and nationally.

In addition to the work we do now we hope to create a data bank, produce a body of information literature, create a food list to help parents administer "autistic diet", create a more consistent phone line service and office situation, foster therapies and treatments for mentally handicapped children.