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.

Due to the previous successful Let’s Speak Up and Let’s Speak Up 2 programmes in Jakarta, YAPESDI aims to scale up. So more Youth with Down Syndrome could speak up and step forward to become self-advocates and make progress in joining advocacy in the cross-disability movement and ensuring that there is no one left behind. The program is scaled up in many more places besides Jakarta, thus Youth with Down Syndrome from another part of the city or regions has the same opportunity to speak up and be empowered as YwDSs who live in a more fortunate place to truly achieve dignity and equity of opportunity.

YAPESDI also aims to train more human resources by doing internal and external capacity strengthening. The organisation will train and educate more human resources for the staff candidate to become a coach and for the existing self-advocates to become peer-buddies or class assistants. The internal capacity building strengthens their skill and ability to help in conducting the programme. Furthermore, they will train the teachers, trainers, support person, and parent who live in Jakarta and outside Jakarta.

YAPESDI is acutely aware of the uncertainty, situation, and conditions due to COVID-19 whereas YwDSs are one group that fall in a high-risk group to catch virus include Coronavirus due to their comorbid condition. And that even in 2021 Indonesia is still in early stages, even more the new cases of positive Covid-19 are on the rise or getting worse each day. Yet, they are still eager to do the scale-up project and have decided to conduct an online class as the best option to do so they could scale up the project with different communities but as well from other provinces. By doing theintervention online they could then reach out more participants from places around Indonesia.

This projet is part of the Empowerment Accelerated pilot project. Empowerment Accelerators are grants for previous or existing Empowerment grantees who wish to continue and/or deepen their empowerment journeys.