Cristi's Outreach Foundation

We opened July 11, 2001 as Cristi’s School in Barlad, Romania for nine orphans with disabilities. We founded Cristi’s Outreach Foundation in May, 2004… here is an update to four and a half years of ABA therapy in Romania!

While the Brent Woodall Foundation and Bridge of Love are separate foundations, we still communicate with Laurie Lundberg on a regular basis. We went back to Tutova to meet with Dr. Asoltanei and with Mihaela, the social worker from Global Volunteers, who asked us to look at several of their special-needs children. We currently provide one-on-one ABA and speech therapy in an ABA format, as well as a group developmental music program at Tutova’s Failure to Thrive Unit for 16 hours a week for a group of 13 children with a variety of disabilities. Our program in Barlad includes over 16 children from the community who come in for therapy at our office. We go back and forth between the two sites, and we feel our system is working well. The level of therapy has soared, now that we have a full-time director in place and a Romanian therapist who recently trained in the United States, along with a legal counsel who also has an advanced degree in psychology traveling back and forth to keep tabs on the Romanian programs.

Our office in Barlad has undergone renovations to accommodate the ever-growing numbers of children coming from the community for ABA and speech therapy and our group activities for socialization – we have added offices and a speech therapy room. The children receive between 10 and 20 hours therapy per week, including ABA, Speech Therapy and group activities. We currently have 13 full-time staff members and several part-time employees and volunteers. Our entire staff works tirelessly to improve their skills by becoming proficient in English, as well as reading books on ABA, speech and play therapy, taking ABA courses via the internet and receiving hands-on training. With so many staff and children, our office is a daily buzz of excitement and learning!

For the youngsters at Tutova, we developed a music therapy program based on Kindermusic. Our program provided stimulation through movement, music, and sensory input. Once we got the children connected through their sensory processing, we began to do some basic one-to-one intervention with them. We give them four hours of varied activities four days per week, including tactile stimulation through massage and gentle touch and play—of which they were initially terrified, being unused to such handling. We found the music therapy so successful that one of the staff, Carmen Zlatan Cazacu, is now certified as a Kindermusic instructor. Carmen had spent six months in Dallas completing her ABA training. When we discovered her beautiful singing voice and musical talents, we realized she would be a huge asset to our sensory integration work. (Kindermusic is very excited about our pilot program in Romania, and is eager to learn how their developmentally appropriate techniques for normal children translate into therapy for those with disabilities.) Carmen is also leading a music group for our younger children in the Barlad office two afternoons per week. At Tutova we rotate the children through the music group activities, so while some are doing their sensory work, others are engaged in the individual ABA or speech therapy sessions.

Our techniques have slowly yet surely begun to spread to other sites. For example, Myosotis has sent several people to our office for training on occasion. They have been using visual supports for the nonverbal children along with other systems of reinforcement to help them, and that is because of the work we have done. This growing respect for Applied Behavior Analysis augers well for the special needs children of Romania. Tutova and Barlad lie in the Moldova District, the poorest region of Romania. In an impoverished country, these people have the fewest resources. Our program has been reaching out to the people of the area, and further, to other communities around Romania. We have also been seeing families who live too far away to attend our day program in our Barlad office. We provide an educational and speech evaluation as well as parent training in ABA and speech techniques that the parents can do at home with their children. This is a replication of the Outreach Program the Brent Woodall Foundation conducts here in the United States.

We hope to get an endowment to open a site in Iasi, but this takes time; the grants process is slow, and the money does not always flow in. We are developing relationships with the Iasi hospitals and have generated excitement over ABA there.

A good site is not built overnight. It has taken four years of hard work and dedication to build Cristi’s Outreach Foundation. We look back and remember the little boy, Cristian who inspired us all to help these children of Romania. Through our hard work and dedication we will continue to improve and help the children of Romania.