1 December 2021
Operation Santa Claus Nov 2021
The Zubin Foundation to provide counselling, therapy, and workshops in Hindi, Urdu and English next year
Cash injection will let them help 100 children with autism, ADHD, or dyslexia, aged six to 12
Children with special educational needs who are members of Hong Kong’s ethnic minorities are often overlooked by their families and schools, a charity dedicated to helping them said.
The Zubin Foundation is in the process of opening a centre to help children from low-income backgrounds to get back on track with their studies by providing counselling, therapy, and workshops in Hindi, Urdu and English next year.
With a donation from the American investment bank Morgan Stanley through Operation Santa Claus, a fundraising campaign organised by the South China Morning Post and public broadcaster RTHK since 1988, 100 ethnic minority children with autism, ADHD, or dyslexia, aged six to 12, will benefit.
Project manager Ravina Lalvani, a clinical psychologist, said low education levels among parents in ethnic minority families made it harder for SEN children to seek help.
“When they come to our workshops, they are able to say ‘something is wrong, but I don’t know what’s wrong’. For them, even going to the doctor is the first big step,” she said.
“They went to the doctor, they were told that the child has developmental delay, autism or ADHD, that’s it. They get a piece of paper … and that’s it. They don’t know what to do from there.”
She added that a child’s needs may often go unnoticed, as it could be mistaken as them misbehaving, while language barriers meant there was often a communication gap between the parents and teachers.
Lalvani noted that it was important to provide the service in their native languages because it was difficult to speak to anyone outside their culture.
“They don’t feel judged, they don’t feel discriminated against. They feel, in fact, safe, they feel understood. They feel that they can believe in us because of the [same] culture,” she said.
“And then they talk about themselves, about how difficult it is to parent a child, not only in special needs, but just in general because of the lack of support they received in the community or their families.”
The centre will work closely with schools, which will refer the children to the charity. Separate interviews with the parents and children, as well as home visits will be arranged, in order to design holistic intervention plans.
Ten sessions of specialised therapies such as occupational, speech, applied behaviour analysis or physiotherapies will also be offered to the children, while parents will be trained to better communicate and build a better relationship with their children.
“That’s where the parents really struggle. They don’t know how to communicate. They don’t know how to just be with children with special needs because they need to be approached differently,” Lalvani added.
The Zubin Foundation founder and CEO Shalini Mahtani expressed her gratitude to the donor and OSC.
“The Morgan Stanley grant will change the lives of special needs children from the poorest communities in Hong Kong and for that I am extremely grateful,” she said.
“And because of Morgan Stanley and their staff, a hundred children will receive the therapies that they would never ever be able to afford.”
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