For the 43-year-old orthopaedically challenged Surya Nagappan life so
far revolved around his organisation CALIBER that works for people with
locomotor disabilities. But no longer so. He was handed over the reins
of UDIS Forum as its new managing trustee in Coimbatore on Saturday.
Founder and managing trustee of UDIS Forum M.N.G. Mani greeting Surya
Nagappan, the new managing trustee, and other trustees on Saturday.
So is the case with Usha Visweswaran, vice-president of SAARATHY-PAMMAC,
which is an association of parents of the mentally challenged. She is
now one of the trustees of UDIS Forum.
Nine persons including them — three orthopaedically challenged, two
visually impaired, two hearing-impaired, and two parents of persons with
disabilities, will get a chance to bring together their individual
experiences under a single roof and to work for the united cause of
persons with all kinds of disabilities.
The UDIS (You and the Disabled) Forum, which began working for the cause
of differently-abled in 2006, under the leadership of M.N.G. Mani as
its Managing Trustee, will now be led and governed by a team of
differently-abled and their parents. It is a network of persons with
disabilities, their parents, professionals and voluntary organisations,
for facilitating employment and empowerment of persons with
disabilities.
It was an emotional moment as the founding trust handed over the network
formally to the new trust. According to Mr. Mani, though this
conversion idea germinated even while at the conception stage of the
network, it took six years to make it into a legally viable entity with
assured financial support.
“The network is now in a comfort zone and hence the time was right to
hand it over to be managed by them. This is an organisation for the
differently-abled, so we believe that it will be handled well by them.
We hope this conversion will be a role model for other such networks,”
he said. Though the decision of conversion was not a very difficult one,
the implementation was. A great deal of work had to go into convincing
the original Trust members, the funding agencies and of course the new
Trust, which was vary of carrying forward the activities as it was being
done.
According to Mr. Nagappan, though it is not easy to carry forward the
baton, when we realised that we expected to take up the primary
responsibility of running the organisation as a united whole for the
disability movement, we agreed to accept the challenge.
The attempt was seen as an opportunity to develop the individual
organisations of the trustees and also to use UDIS Forum as a bridge to
link all these organisations that worked for different disabilities.
Source : The Hindu , 28th April 2013
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