Filomena

Welcome! My name is Igor Konyovsky, I am the head of the Filomena Educational and Rehabilitation Center for Children with Disabilities. The public organization was founded in 2016 to help parents with children with special needs in educational and rehabilitation activities. “I understand the problem of parents of children with disabilities better than anyone else, because my family has faced it directly. We have a daughter with special needs, who is 12 years old, and two other healthy children. Therefore, we, as parents of many children, understand the urgency of creating a community of parents of children with disabilities on the basis of the Filomena NGO.

The primary task of the community is to hold meetings of parents of children with disabilities. To do this, we need a room that will be at least partially adapted for such purposes. Psychologists, rehabilitation therapists and speech therapists will also be involved. Based on statistics, I would like to inform you that approximately 25 children of different age groups in Starosambir UTC alone have severe cerebral palsy and neurology, and there are three other UTCs in the former Starosambir district: Strilkivska, Khyrivska and Dobromylska. In total, there are four UTCs. So the number of children can exceed one hundred.

A full-fledged family is a great value in today's materialized world. Imagine a single mother raising a child with a disability - it is very hard work, both physically and psychologically. Today, the state does not have a properly developed mechanism to help such parents. The social assistance received by a child with a disability and a caregiver is not enough to cover the necessary rehabilitation processes. On the other hand, post-Soviet society is not ready to accept such families. From my own experience, I can say that it is difficult for parents to transform their children into the social environment in such a situation. Most parents raising children with disabilities are ashamed of their situation, because there is such a thing as: “What will people say? How will they react to us?” Therefore, such families really need socializing in the community to relieve their emotional state. The war in the twenty-first century is a real challenge for Ukrainian children, and if they are children with special needs, it is a real challenge for their parents. Many families have become IDPs, so this problem is more urgent than ever.

As the head of the NGO “Filomena” and the father of a child with special needs, I started to reconstruct my own premises where the newly created community could gather, and unfortunately, my own funds are not enough to re-equip it for the needs of children with disabilities, so we are forced to seek help from international funds.

We will be grateful in advance to everyone who will respond to our request. I would like to say: “If each of us set a goal in this life to do at least something useful for our neighbor, the world would become a much better place.”