Last Saturday (4 Nov 2017) Soulpancake, a well known digital media company that publishes around creativity, social enterprises and related content, posted a video on Filisia at its website, twitter and Facebook page. Four days later the post has been viewed more that 110k times and brought a lot of interest in Filisia’s work.
The video stems from the lovely work of Ellie Wen (linkedin) and Greg Katz (linkedin) who approached us in April 2015. As part of their “Good Stories Please” project, they were visiting different countries, meeting with social enterprises and making short videos on their work. Ellie and Greg are purpose driven, creative, professional and much fun to be around. We know about other enterprises that shot videos for and can’t wait to watch those too.
We are grateful with Ellie’s and Greg’s work and we are certainly happy with the publicity that SoulPancake has brought to filisia, nevertheless, we feel we need to make some clarifications.
The video starts with the claim that 1 in 6 people struggle with a disability. Estimates like these are often based of rough approaches and on very wide definitions of disability. Filisia primarily works on people with moderate to severe conditions of autism, cerebral palsy and brain injury. Thankfully the percentage of people is far smaller than 1 in 6.
Secondly, we would also avoid using the word “struggle” as not everyone with a disability struggles with it.
SoulPancake’s editors used the term “special needs” in one of their video introducing comments. Although well intended, “Special Needs” is still an unfortunate but widely used term. At least here in the UK the standard terminology for the population we work with, is SEN (Special Education Needs) or SEND (Special Education Needs and Disabilities).
Finally, we’d like to note that our CEO, Georgios mentions “rehabilitation” in the video. This is because at the time that the interview was shot, our team was working primarily with people that had acquired conditions (brain injury and young stroke) where rehabilitation is an appropriate term, rather than congenital conditions such as autism and cerebral palsy which has since become our main focus.
Closing, we are grateful to Ellie and Greg for their beautiful work and to soulpancake for the valuable exposure.
