Building a Future of Hope and Promise
Keystone Moldova English and Keystone Moldova Romanian
Keystone Human Services (KHS) is a non-profit organization that is a part of a global movement to provide support and expertise to people with disabilities.
A Jhalak shared by Maria Santamaria, Founder & CEO, Diya Foundation, Bengaluru
In the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt, “we cannot always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.” Building up our younger generations to be people who are humble, willing to be always open to learning, change, and feedback, mindful of their personal strengths and weaknesses is something we all need to strive toward. They should be people who choose to build self-awareness, be aware of blind spots and strive to be simple and authentic. There is a dire need for such young leaders in the world today.
At Diya Foundation, we are on the lookout for such young people who are open to learning, open to the bigger vision of being changemakers through examples and thinking outward for change as well as inward. One of our ways of doing this is to expose them to programs that teach these values.
Working with Keystone has been a game changer for all of us at Diya through the Social Role Valorization program. As a leader, I have learned that no matter how badly we don’t want to, all of us as humans have our biases and weaknesses but just by being present to them we can start working toward bringing change. The Social Role Valorization program helped us reflect and opened our eyes to our unconscious biases. It has helped us to internalize and be present to our biases and figure out solutions, and possible ways to share this with other stakeholders in the community.
Three of our young trainers were also exposed to the Direct Service Provider training, which empowered them with a vision to work committedly towards the training of other direct service providers and are now looking at the bigger picture of sharing this training with interested parents who could then take it forward.
This capacity building of our service providers has really helped us in the way we train, assume competency, and work with our young adults and this results in a magical transformation in the space of positivity and acceptance.