Providing a workplace for injured people
Project location: BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA, Sarajevo
Project start date: March 2002 -
Project end date: October 2002
Project number: 2001-16
Beneficiary: Center for Self-Reliance
The Center for Self Reliance (CSR), is a Bosnia and Herzegovina NGO, dedicated to bringing people with limited physical ability out of isolation and placing them into the mainstream of society, thereby improving their lives and enriching the community at the same time. It assists individuals with limited physical ability to adjust their formal education, skills and habits to the current reality of their lives. The central idea of the CSR Training Program has been to support economic development and creation of new sustainable workplaces for people with disabilities in Sarajevo.
Many people in Bosnia, injured during the war, have had to reorganize their lives since becoming disabled. They are often unable to work in the careers they had planned, or to return to the jobs they had held before they were injured. Other people have debilitating diseases (such as cerebral palsy) that leave them in wheelchairs. There are no opportunities for them in the educational and professional sense. Young people with disabilities cannot be educated to meet the new world standards in any field, nor can they find suitable jobs.
In this situation, CSR opened, with the help of the European Commission, a center where people with disabilities can gain information about current developments in the region, as well as discover new skills for which they have a talent, is critical. This center helped 30 people with disabilities in teaching them to make handcrafts out of wood, silk and glass.
With the end of the funds from the EC, the center has been forced to close and the injured people who were used to attend the center, to stop making handcraft goods for local distributors. The funds allocated by the Nando Peretti Foundation will allow the CSR to re-open the center, to purchase workshop materials, such as paints, silk and glass, and to provide transportation for the project participants since public transport in Sarajevo is not accessible to people in wheelchairs.
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