Naked Heart Foundation UK to fund the 3-year research project to develop a new Global Parent Education and Training Programme.
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14 February 2022
In line with its mission to build an inclusive society through the creation of free support services for families raising children with special needs, Naked Heart Foundation UK is delighted to announce the commencement of a major new project in collaboration with the University of Cape Town and the University of Edinburgh.
The project will enable a global initiative to develop and evaluate a knowledge, skills and support programme for families of young children with autism, contributing to their welfare and wellbeing.
The idea of a global parent education and training programme (Global PET) started several years ago when Prof Petrus de Vries, University of Cape Town, met with Naked Heart Foundation’s experts Dr Slava Dovbnya and Dr Tanya Mozorova through colleagues at Autism Speaks. In 2019 a meeting was convened in Cambridge and a draft application prepared for project’s funding. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic caused some structural delays to progress, but finally Naked Heart Foundation UK can confirm that the funding has been approved, and the contracts have now been completed.
“The home and family context is the most important place for autistic people to grow and learn. In this new project, we will develop a freely available and adaptable programme to support families who live with autism around the world. By providing parents, siblings, and caregivers with knowledge, strategies and wellbeing tools, we can make sure that families are empowered and that all people with autism can thrive. I am very excited about the vast potential of this partnership project between the Centre for Autism Research in Africa at the University of Cape Town, and Naked Heart Foundation
Professor Petrus J de Vries, Centre for Autism Research in Africa, Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Cape Town, South Africa
The formative phase of the three-year project will last from 1 July 2022 to 30 June 2023.
During the upcoming four-month period between the signing of the agreement and the formal start of the project, the project team will focus on completing the necessary preparatory work.
This project will provide us with a good autism family support prototype programme with high-quality feasibility data and limited efficacy data. The next step of the project will then be to scale-up training to other organisations, providing support services to families raising autistic children in the three international research sites, and later to expand the training and field-testing to more countries.
In Year 1 (Formative Phase), the project team aims to develop a comprehensive impact and dissemination plan. At the in-person meeting of the project members, the team will discuss the way forward and consider next steps to have more rigorous efficacy testing and comparison studies.
The Global PET project is a major step in Naked Heart Foundation’s efforts to make support services for families raising children with disabilities and special needs effective, free and widely accessible. For over 10 years the Foundation has been providing parents, caregivers and childcare professionals with access to the latest evidence-based methods of supporting autistic children and their families. The new project will complement this work with a practical support programme, complete with clear guidelines for translation and cultural adaptation for global application.
My own experience of being a sibling of a person with multiple disabilities, including ASD, and the experience of my family have turned out to be both a great challenge and a huge inspiration. This inspiration has been one of the driving forces behind the work that Naked Heart Foundation does for almost 17 years. The work, in which a family has always been in the centre of activities. Autism does not have boundaries, but so as the Parent Education and Training (PET) programmes, that over the years have proven their effectiveness. And our aim is to put together such PET programme, that will be available in the formats and languages, suitable for families and communities across different settings
Natalia Vodianova, founder of Naked Heart Foundation
To find out more about Global PET, check our Projects page here.