Down Syndrome Care Foundation Indonesia (YAPESDI) is a non-profit foundation that is focused on the work of empowering youth and adults with Down Syndrome or any other intellectual disability and their families. YAPESDI vision is the realisation of a society which has a culture of being friendly, fair and sensitive to persons who live with Down Syndrome or other persons with intellectual disability and their families.

In Indonesia, children with Down syndrome (DS) or more generally children with intellectual disabilities are almost never accepted by public schools, even by the so called inclusive public schools. This situation obviously does not enable children with DS to develop their cognitive skills and interact with the society at large. These children rarely have the opportunity to speak out and would not dare to do so anyway.

This struggle to speak out is usually due to the way adults consider Down’s syndrome people. They (adults and sometimes parents) believe that Down’s syndrome people do not have the intellectual capacity to understand their situation/disabilities. This is why adults often prevent the DS persons’ voices to speak up or be heard: they dissuade questions or repress curiosity, believing that the children do not need to know or that it is better they do not know.

This is a second phase of the project, Let’s Speak-Up, whose aim is to; have more youths with down syndrome speak up and step forward to become self-advocate and also join in advocacy in the cross-disability movement and ensuring that there is no one left behind.

The phase will incorporate youths with DS from other cities/regions unlike the first phase which only focused on Jakarta. Additionally, the project will implement capacity strengthening such as training for the teachers, trainers, support persons, and parents.