Painting, singing, acting, cooking, doing cleaning and household chores – youth with intellectual disabilities come to a Charity Association for people with intellectual disabilities Джерела to learn these practical skills, the most vital of them being communication.
Meet Vanya, 27, a devoted visitor of this charity association.
“I really like it here. There is always something new to learn. See what I can do,” he says, demonstrating his Kung Fu skills that he learned from watching the movie, Ip Man.
His fellow Lyosha, 28, comes to the charity association to take dance, paint and cooking classes. Sometimes he moderates classes himself. “Learning is important for me. I am more prepared to handle everyday situations,” he says.
Vania and Lyosha are among 180 young people with intellectual disabilities who come to this charity association to master new skills and become more independent in their everyday life.
Last year, the organization became one of the winners of UNDP’s U-Inn initiative aimed to promote social innovations for democracy and human rights.
Charity Association Джерела is a Kyiv-based CSO that provides training and services for people with intellectual disabilities, including counselling, social rehabilitation, craft workshops and art events. Through art, learning and fun activities, excursions, the organization helps their beneficiaries to get practical skills and meet more people beyond their usual, very limited circle.
Charity Association Джерела was founded by a group of 20 mothers of children with intellectual disabilities, and has grown to 180. By now, they have by their side dozens of volunteers from across Kyiv and Kyiv region, and also receive support from some foreign countries, including Germany.
Many volunteers are students of psychology, education, theatre, physical education, who teach the youth with disabilities their own specialties.
Anna, 26, a volunteer, says her engagement with the charity association was a life-changing experience. “I left my boring office job. I wasn’t happy with it anyway. I started volunteering here and I feel I’m actually doing something meaningful. That’s how I got interested in social work.”
Daria, 22, has joined the charity association as a volunteer six years ago. She still remembers the first time when she came to the organization and was taken by surprise receiving welcome hugs from the beneficiaries.
“It’s not an easy task,” she says. “You need to be really patient. You know you can do tasks faster than them, while they need time to learn." It’s also very rewarding, she notes, when they do learn a new skill.
The youth with intellectual disabilities often communicate solely with their family members, rehabilitation therapists and each other. At the same time, their peers interact with their communities, and this experience plays a crucial role in their self-fulfillment and integration.
Social isolation of youth with mental impairments is a sure path to stigma, discrimination, and negative stereotypes. This wicked chain could be broken through open communication between the people with intellectual disabilities and their peers and wider community, explain the authors their social innovation.
With a 5,000 USD grant from UNDP's U-Inn Contest, the charity association's youth team is going to implement their awareness project called “Communication without limitations”.
The charity association's youth team aims to reach out to students and engage more volunteers into their activities. As an introductory step, they will be explaining the students peculiarities of interaction with people with intellectual disabilities. To back up the theory with praxis, there will be several inclusion camps organized in Bohuslav, Kyiv region, where students and youth with intellectual disabilities will interact in pairs, develop their emotional intelligence and a sense of teamwork.
The participants will live in the same place, engage in common household chores, participate in weaving, soap- and candle-making, cooking workshops. The charity association's team will provide twenty four hour psychological and teaching support to the participants. Apart from that, there will an inclusive theatre studio run during the camp to prepare some joint performances to be presented after returning from the camp.
The charity association's youth team are not new to organizing inclusion camps. A short video report about their camp organized last December is available on the organization’s facebook page.
To scale-up their innovative inclusive approach, the charity association's team is going to present their experience to students of three Kyiv universities, including Hrinchenko Kyiv University, Drahomanov Pedagogical University, and Kyiv-Mohyla Academy’s Social Work School.
Another follow-up step is teaming up with the Coalition for protection of persons with intellectual disabilities so that to have more channels to promote their approach through a network of 116 civic organizations.
U-Inn is a UNDP initiative to promote social innovations that contribute to democracy and human rights. The initiative is being implemented under the project “Civil Society for Enhanced Democracy and Human Rights in Ukraine” funded by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark and in partnership with the Ministry of Youth and Sports of Ukraine.
© 2026 UNDP Ukraine
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