The Naked Heart Foundation is an international charity founded by supermodel and philanthropist Natalia Vodianova in 2004. Its main mission is to help build an inclusive society that is open to people with disabilities and special needs, through encouraging play and creation of free support services for disadvantaged families.
Our projects fall into three categories:
Supporting children and families – ensuring the necessary social and legal support and providing support programmes for families raising children with autism, cerebral palsy and other special needs.
Developing a professional community – training specialists to work with people with special needs, creating a platform for specialists and parents to exchange knowledge and experience, and informing public servants about inclusion.
Advocacy – developing an inclusive society by raising awareness. This work is aimed at transforming people’s attitudes towards children and adults with intellectual, physical and sensory developmental disabilities, and their families.
Over the years, more than 20,000 children and young people with special needs and their family members have received specialist support from us.
Supported employment
Training for professionals to help young people with autism and other special needs find and maintain employment
Alena is 19 years old, she has autism. For a long time she couldn’t find a job. Since September 2021, Alena started preparing for her future work at the Naked Heart Foundation. Initially, where she was taught how to write a resume, pass an interview and other necessary skills. In some time, she was offered a job at the cleaning company "Vodservis" at the stadium "Nizhny Novgorod", and she happily agreed to work there. In 2 weeks Alena worked on the skills she needs to do this job, including sorting out work equipment, preparing for the work day, and walking a new route from work to home.
Andrey is 32 years old, he has autism. He worked as a courier, promoter. He was helped to find a new job at NtechLab at the Job-I Center, a participant in the Supported Employment project of the Naked Heart Foundation. Now Andrey is engaged in data markup for further neural network programming. The salary suits him, he likes his job: “I work online 4 hours a day from 11:00 to 15:00& I like it that way. It's better than offline. I had difficulties in commutating offline.”
Alexey is 20 years old, he has autism and currently he works at Nizhny Novgorod stadium. Firstly, he tried to find a job by himself but unfortunately, he couldn’t find any. And then he entered the Naked Heart Family Support Center, we he participated in the Supported Employment project. The staff of the Center helped Alexey to find a job and still helps him if there are any difficulties. Alexey really likes to work there, he communicates well with his colleagues. He became more responsible and independent. He works as a janitor, he cleans the territory, takes out garbage, collects leaves and clears snow. And currently he trains the new employees by himself.
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