In Athens I had the opportunity to visit Theotokos Foundation, a center of excellence dedicated to children, adolescents and young adults suffering from psychophysical disabilities.
The link between our territory and this institution is represented by its director, Dr. Jannis Papakonstantinou, a specialist in child psychiatry, who began his university studies in Ancona at the Faculty of Medicine of the Polytechnic University of Marche. Doctor Papakonstantinou found himself well in Ancona and the Marche, so much so that he remained tied to this area, where he spent the years from 1979 to 1983, maintaining ties with the friendships he made then. I am among these friends and in my last stay in the Greek capital Jannis wanted me to visit the center that he runs.
It is a complex of structures located in the Ilion district north-east of the city, harmoniously distributed over 5 hectares and immersed in an ideal microclimate as they border the large Tritsis Ecological Park.
In this vast area there are offices, clinics, bars, restaurants, kitchens, cellars, computer rooms, a 240-seat theatre, gym, tennis, athletics and basketball courts, vegetable gardens, greenhouses and 23 laboratories, including gardening and vegetable gardens, carpentry, cooking, ceramics, property maintenance, secretarial services, IT, recycling of separate waste collection, etc. 103 employees work there, of which 60 are scientific personnel.
The center currently hosts 382 children in daytime activities, of which 22 aged from 2 to 5 years, and 360 aged from 6 to 35 years. Each rehabilitation intervention plan is personalized and shared with children and parents.
Dr. Papakonstantinou's commitment to Theotokos, which began about 8 years ago, has introduced significant and innovative reforms to overcome a stagnant situation of a closed system of essentially only a welfare nature that dates back to the 90s. He started with a laborious reorganization of staff roles and tasks. This then allowed us to establish contacts and collaborations with local authorities, associations and universities, participation in European projects, the creation of new laboratories, the establishment of tutoring to make the children responsible for the maintenance of the structure and for their introduction to work. , the digitization of all documents relating to the functioning of the Foundation, the introduction of monitoring and evaluation systems for all the services offered.
A particularly important innovation concerns the collaboration with the local municipality, which has around 100.000 inhabitants, for widespread screening in all nursery schools aimed at early diagnosis of growth disorders through interviews and tests distributed to each child and each parent. He then introduced the development of collaborative projects, organization and participation in studies and conferences, including at an international level. It has signed cooperation contracts with the Universities of Athens and Cyprus through which the Theotokos Center welcomes students in training and internships.
The workshops are designed to accommodate the most varied inclinations and aptitudes and represent usual and more advanced activities, such as to constitute an effective viaticum towards job placement. The three-dimensional printing laboratory will soon be built and in this regard negotiations have been started with an NGO dedicated to cleaning the Mediterranean from valuable recyclable plastic, in order to use it for the creation of objects of various uses.
Together with the rehabilitation service, each boy receives practical work instruction, which he experiments in the laboratories. The center is able to offer training for children and operators, education and support, family support, group therapies, sexual education, computer education, art therapy, music therapy, pet therapy, yoga, job placement and tutoring.
Energy and resources are also dedicated to research and experimentation with innovative teaching methods. I witnessed a rehearsal of a video commissioned by Theotokos from the Kinems company, specialized in the production of interactive educational computer games, whose director, Simon Retalis, worked together with the structure's experts to create a tool for learning various subjects by subjects suffering from autism through videos capable of remotely reading body movements. This program records the progress of each subject, building a qualitative and temporal report, which offers analytical monitoring of the progress for each subject. Among other things, this package can be rented at relatively low costs and can also be requested in Italian from the Kinems headquarters in California. Truly interesting and original and I believe formidably effective.
In short, I really appreciated this functional, well-managed and also beautiful structure, with its large, lush and well-kept green spaces and its welcoming and comfortable buildings.
Thanks to Jannis Papakonstantinou, to his profound professionalism, which allows him to also be a consultant for healthcare reform, a position received from the previous government and confirmed by the new one. With the hope that he will want and be able to export his experience to our territory, a place that has seen the first steps of his preparation.
Carla Virili
