No Labels No Walls Action Monday: Society for the Welfare of Autistic Children (SWAC) & Giriphul Project
- Date
-
Mon 10 May 2021
5:00 pm - 6:00 pm
- Venue
- Online
No Labels No Walls is a forum to reach hundreds of people worldwide and we meet every Monday. On top of our meet-ups we join forces and produce No Labels No Walls Festival as part of the CitizenFest movement. Supported by The Strindberg Laboratory in Los Angeles and Kukunori in Finland and Citizen Network worldwide the movement brings people together every Monday.
This Action Monday will feature Mofijul Islam of the Society for the Welfare of Autistic Children (SWAC) and Marja Helinä Nuutinen of the SWAC-associated Giriphul Project, a small special school established in Rangamati, Bangladesh in 2014 with support from SWAC.
Mofijul Islam has completed a postgraduate degree in Social Welfare at Dhaka University. He joined the Society for the Welfare of Autistic Children (SWAC) in December 2002 as an Administrative Officer. As Project Manager he operated two development co-operation projects, called Prerona and Srijon, from 2007 to 2016, supported by the Finnish Foreign Ministry, together with Marja Helinä Nuutinen.
He is currently working as a Project Manager in the Giriphul Project in Rangamati, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh and as a Deputy Director in the SWAC. He has participated in special training on autism and global education in Finland, India, Hungary, Czech Republic and Thailand. He has also completed the Queen’s Certificate Online Program on Disability in the Community Based Rehabilitation (CBR) and International Development, ICACBR, Queens University, Kingston, Canada in 2014. His writings have been published several times in Finnish and Czech Republic magazines related to autism.
Marja Helinä Nuutinen has a bachelor’s degree in social sciences and master’s degree in community pedagogics. She is an autism real-life expert and an enabler of the spectrum of life. Her favourite words are inclusion and happiness. She has designed, initiated and implemented disability, integration, inclusion and global education projects in Bangladesh and Finland. She has done research on autism, multiculturalism and integration. She has published several articles and videos and writes her own blog.
She has lived around the world and believes that we are originally nomads. She worked as a Project Manager in Prerona and Srijon projects from 2007 to 2016 in Bangladesh, supported by the Finnish Foreign Ministry. Presently she is working as a Project Manager in the Giriphul Project in Rangamati, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. She also coordinates her own Ullash-Godchildren program in Bangladesh for the most underprivileged children at the SWAC school.
Marja is also a chair of her own organisation, EETE, created to celebrate the diversity of life and working for empowerment, empathy, teamwork, togetherness and a more energetic way to live.