Three friends started a weekend hobby class for people with intellectual disabilities while pursuing their master’s degrees in special education.
When the friends asked some of the people with disabilities if they had ever watched a movie or gone shopping, most said they had not.
So the trio started taking them to movies, clubs, and restaurants, and even took them on a holiday to Goa by train, which resulted in a remarkable change in their demeanour.
What began as a small initiative soon blossomed into something much larger. These sessions boosted the youngsters' skills, communication, and self-care. To bridge the gap in training, opportunities, and experiences, the trio established a full-fledged training centre.
Launched in 2011, the Mann Centre for Individuals with Special Needs in Santacruz, Mumbai, was founded by special educators Beverly Louis, Geetanjali Gaur, and Dilshad Mehershahi, along with Gautam Lalwani, who handles the finances.
The centre provides training for people with learning disabilities, Down syndrome, and autism. It equips them with skills like functional academics, social skills, physical wellness, daily activity training, and extracurriculars.
A key focus area is making them job ready and finding them employment. Thanks to Mann, around 250 people with disabilities are now working at restaurants, corporations, supermarkets, and other hospitality sectors.
So far, Mann has trained over 500 people, and the best part is the fact that some of these students have themselves become trainers!
“We observed that four of our beneficiaries had started imitating us as trainers. They grasped all our skills without being trained to be teachers,” says Dilshad.
Recognising their potential, the founders offered these students assistant teacher roles, leading to the development of a comprehensive employment training module.
“When they received their first cheque, they were overjoyed. The reaction of their parents too completely transformed us. They were appreciated by their parents for the first time. So we developed an intensive curriculum to make them employable,” Beverly shares.
This training takes anywhere between one to three years. The first job placements of the students were at Cafe Zoe in Mumbai.
Since then, Mann’s students have been employed in companies like Microsoft, JW Marriott, Inox, Olive and more, working in kitchens, customer service, data entry, ushering and other such roles.
The response from employers has been tremendous, according to the founders. “They always come back to hire more of our students,” says Beverly proudly.
To make their curriculum accessible to a broader audience, the team at Mann digitised and shared it on an open-source platform called Zoho.
For students who cannot undertake mainstream roles or travel, the team provides employment through Karmann, where they create decor and lifestyle products.
The founders hope that more people will come forward to employ people with intellectual disabilities. “We want to impact 5,000 students per year. Our long-term goal is to have a setup where they can stay as a community, perhaps an apartment complex,” says Beverly.