From Friday 31 May to Sunday 2 June 2024 it was a very busy weekend for the aniridia community in Stockholm. In fact, the 7th European Aniridia Conference and its satellite meetings gathered 180 persons, from researchers to clinicians, from patient representatives to families, to talk about aniridia as a rare eye disease and about the social inclusion of visually impaired people.
In this framework, Aniridia Europe organised two multiplier events for the Erasmus+ project “Together for inclusion: young people with low vision for active participation and associationism around the world”, funded by the European Union with the overall objective of preparing the young with low vision to lead the creation and management of associations in European and Latino-American societies.
The first event, on 31 May, was included in the programme of the European Aniridia Leadership Academy (EALA) that gathered more than 20 visually impaired young people to dialogue with mentors experienced in different fields, such as sport, digital accessibility, daily life, social inclusion; in this context, the presentation of “Together for inclusion” fit perfectly, and conveyed the knowledge of valuable tools to support associationism and to promote awareness about the possibilities that it offers to the visually impaired young people.
The second event was included in the Nordic meeting, the gathering of Scandinavian aniridia patients and families; here again the presentation of the project was very appreciated by the participants.
In both events, as the majority of the audience was composed by visually impaired persons, Aniridia Europe’s representatives decided not to use an ordinary digital presentation, that would have been inaccessible, but to explain in details the content of the project and to refer the participants to its website sighttogether.eu, where they can consult all the deliverables of the project and specifically the Methodological guide and the Manual.
It was shown how these works are aimed at empowering young people with low vision to form new associations and organizations, as well as at understanding the importance of associationism worldwide, by first hand experiencing both the benefits of belonging to an association and the objectives that can be achieved through these entities.
