Animal Assisted Therapy for Special Needs Children

We have some exciting news about the expansion of this program. Over the last few years, several groups of children from East Jerusalem have attended the program. Accordingly, we were delighted to include two Arabic-speakers in our team of therapists which allowed these children to receive treatment in their mother tongue - obviously far more effective than when we are forced to utilize a translator. This was also a great experience for our team because it was an opportunity to bring together two cultures, providing the opportunity to learn from one another.

Partly as a result of our pioneering efforts in this field, the David Yellin College in Jerusalem developed a course for therapists in the Arabic language. This will provide us with a new trained pool of potential therapists to draw from. Our goal, over the next two years, is to add three new Arabic speaking therapists which would allow us to add nine more groups of children from the Arabic speaking community to our program - a very significant expansion.

The first step towards this goal, is our collaboration with David Yellin College whereby we provide a place for three Arabic language therapists in training to conduct a practical internship within our existing program. We wish our new interns the very best in their training and look forward to being able to help even more children in the future.