By 2017, we had a set of students who were by that time 16 or 17 years of age and we realized that we had to transition them to the next phase of their training which is no more a school program.

And we realized that there are not many centers who cater to people with developmental disabilities like autism and intellectual disabilities, so we said that this is the right time to start.

And we…we started with, again, the preferences that our students have which is towards the digital unit, the creative arts, they love sensory things.

So these are the two things that we held on to, and along with that, the food and the catering and the other area which was definitely a big reinforcer for our students, we put it under life skills, and that was how the three domains of Creative Arts, Digital and the Life Skills started.

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Pragati towards livelihood is a unit of Biswagouri Charitable Trust.

In digital literacy, we help our young adults to learn the basic tools in the, like, Microsoft, PowerPoint, all those things.

And also, like, later on, they get the skills in Canva, Photoshop, which helps them to uh create pictures, to make a nice products out of it.

And few of our young adults are working outside as proofreaders, that also comes under our digital literacy.

And in creative arts unit, we have hand-block printing, mosaic art, and loom training.

In hand-block printing, the curriculum helps a trainer and his trainees to understand from the start to end, where they start learning, uh printing on the paper and understanding the orientation of the blocks, how to keep it, how to place it, then so on.

So that helps our adult to produce the products, like later on, when we introduce the fabric, they are the ones who print on the fabric and bring out the beautiful products out of it.

In the mosaic art unit, we start from basic, where it starts from paper, where the young-adult learn what is spacing, what is color combination, what is a boundary.

Then it goes to a little more complicate where, you know, they start mixing up two colors, three colors and so on.

It comes to the end where they are using the tiles to make a products out of it.

Loom, it’s like, there are looms where they make, they’re learning the skills in weaving so that it’s going to be under creative arts unit.

And in the life skill training we have, we mainly work on activities of daily living and safety and sexuality.

‘What is personal space, what is my private parts, where where like, uh how close I can go to the people, uh like, what is my boundary?’ these are things helps in the life skill.

At Pragati we start uh taking adults from 16 and adults with autism from 16 and above.

Uh school we take our adults from our school program as well as from outside.

And when they star…when the adults starts coming here, so they may go to the VRP group, that is the main basic foundation where that is called Vocational Readiness Program.

That helps the adult with autism to understand what Pragati works on, what do we need, because at Pragati we mainly work in the larger group, the adult has to take a instruction from one instructor and and execute the work.

So those necessary skills, adult learn in the VRP group, from there they go the basic group.

So basic group they, like, no, they start learning about sitting tolerance, how long, like, sitting at the task to complete the work.

And the core uh uh activities like our subjects, core domains, we start introducing there, so they start learning from there.

Then that goes to the social regulation where the adult understand ‘if i have any difficulties how I can communicate? When I have a behavior uh difficulties, what are the ways I can regulate myself?’ so those things happen in our emotional regulation classes, which helps our adult to understand.

Then it goes to a employability training where adults learn to execute the work in a meaningful way, complete the task and also have a soft skills as completing the work within a time frame, quality, all those things.

Basically we work with our adults from the basic to advance to intern, to make our adult socially valid person in the society and give his best.

For our adults with autism, it’s like they need a work in a structure way where the work is executed in a visual cues, the start and the stop is there, and also the communication, which is very very important.

The communication is in built in each sessions, where the adult use the Awaz app, some of our adults use the written format to communicate what they need and how to go about it.

Some of the adults use the pictures, like, no, in the structure teaching when I talk about a visual schedule, so that’s right, that starts from the picture exchange, like where the picture is there for them to tell what activity is going to be, how the day is going to look like.

From the pictures it moves on to the words, sentences, where our adults are able to understand how the day is going to be looking like and the times are mentioned there so the adult has their own time table.

They copy from there, they write it in the each column to understand. Already this adult has complete the schedule for tomorrow.

So this is the way the uh day gets over.

And the other setup of uh adults, they don’t want to carry the bags anymore, they say, ‘we want to keep the things in the pocket’, so we have made a pocket schedule.

So this is the schedule look like.

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So, the reason why we do this visual scheduling, because most of our children with autism have very high anxiety, they need to know what their day looks like.

And uh not only that, I mean, if there is any change in the schedule for a, on a given day, how do we tell them that there is going to be a change?

So this visual scheduling has helped us so much in reducing their anxiety, also being more participating because they are already mentally prepared for what’s coming up.

And uh even when we have, we had people when they were 25 or 28 years old, we feel that they still required a pocket diary because whenever anything that they want to know about, what’s coming up, and some obsessive thoughts are coming, it’s all written there that it is going to happen on a particular day at a particular time, and they would see that and they would already know it.

So, this is something which has helped them not only with anxiety but to also regulate their emotions.

Uh we have three people who have moved to Thomson Reuters, two in Wells Fargo, And we have multiple others. And there are, there’s one person who has started their own design studio, using the digital printing.

So we have multiple such small uh stories of success, if you may call it and uh from our best practices. And we would like the world to know that there are many many more opportunities, wonderful people, waiting to open their doors for our people, but we have to be very structured and focussed towards this, preparing them for employment.