“Children are great imitators. So give them something great to imitate.”
It all starts from educating our youths and the young ones about what RARE is all about. YOUths for RARE is a programme for youths who want to come forward to say that they want to advocate for the RARE! When the message is brought across by their own peers, the younger people tend to be more attentive and willing to hear what the shared message is all about. And why the caps with the first three letters of “youth”? It is because the love for our community starts from “YOU”. One area that RDSS has always wanted to do is not just to raise the awareness but also to educate the youths about RARE.
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For example: Like does it make a person less of a human, just because a person cannot communicate verbally? A person may look perfectly “normal” but an invisible rare condition follows the individual for a lifetime. It is a norm too to be fed using a tube. It is just a different way of channelling food into our body. What we want to share with the rest is that having a loved one with a rare condition, does not make us anything more special. We are still a family unit like any other family. We laugh, we cry, we get angry. Having a child with more medical challenges made us more resilient.
Another area would be to allow the youths to pair up with a beneficiary. We can work with their common interest and pair them up with a beneficiary. This allows the youth to interact one on one with someone living with a rare condition. With first hand experience, this would allow the fellow youth to focus on the abilities of someone living with a rare condition rather than just their disabilities. What we need is empathy, not sympathy.
What can the youths do?
1) Raise awareness
2) Come up with programmes that can benefit directly to the beneficiaries
3)Friending our beneficiaries through art/games or common interest
Interested to be Our Youth Rare Advocate? Email Us at amanda@rdss.org.sg
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Interested to be Our Youth Rare Advocate? Email Us at amanda@rdss.org.sg