Local judo club hits perfect note
Judo Assist Ireland is based in Ardcroney, Nenagh, and is a national and international inclusive/adaptive judo organisation that promotes and develops inclusion projects all over the world.
We are currently involved in a number of EU funded research projects that we determine the benefits of sport/physical activity for people with a disability. One such project is specific to benefits of judo as a sport for people with autism.
Our group started work on an inclusion song project earlier in the year with the aim of increasing awareness of the importance and benefits of inclusion, diversity and acceptance in sport, school and in the community.
We engaged a young up and coming singer/songwriter, Jamie Lee Forde from Cloughjordan to help us write and record our song. Taking guidance from the children we decided to make an accompanying video for our song.
Firstly, we taught all the children how to sign the chorus of the song with the help of an former student and audio impaired local man Patrick Collins.
This led us on to recording the students at a number of Tipperary tourist locations, singing and signing the song – we then added some actions clips of the students demonstrating some of their gymnastic and judo skills.
Under normal circumstances this would be unremarkable, but the fact that 85% of the students taking part have various degrees of additional needs/challenges/autism – well then that makes this project 'Remarkable'.
Now that we have finally completed our inclusion song project, we want to share it with you and hopefully you will want to share it with your readers. We are incredibly proud of all the students and volunteers who helped make this project a reality and as you can see it is a real Tipperary affair. Here is the link to view this incredible song and video: https://youtu.be/XfqJgbScYNs.
Although it is not our primary focus, we have also attached a funding stream to the project via GoFundMe https://gofund.me/55bb21d4 to further develop our special/autism school programmes.
If you like what you see and would like to donate, please feel free, but more importantly we would like you to share this information with as many people as possible, so they too can enjoy and embrace the experience.