Family & Community

The program: Parents-for-Parents Supportive Hotline

Parents for Parents supportive hotline is a free service operated by volunteering parents to people with intellectual disability that provides help, support, and information via phone in Hebrew and Arabic. We launched the service in 2002 as a response to the needs of parents for a helping hand and emotional support. The uniqueness of the line lies in the idea that a parent who has previously and is coping with the challenges involved in raising a child with an intellectual disability, can understand and identify, accommodate and assist the parent calling. Volunteers give to every caller’s emotional support, advice from their personal experience, information, guidance, and referral to professional help, all with the backup of professionals in the relevant fields.

The volunteers attend a training workshop to prepare them for the task ahead so they can provide the best and most updated information and counsel. Besides, the volunteering parents receive inspiring and enriching workshops, to refresh their minds and to strengthen their social relations with each other; thus, prolonging their volunteering work in the hotline and assist with the emotional exhaustion.

AKIM Israel’s professional staff accompanies the volunteers throughout the operational hours. When necessary, the team will forward the issue to the care of one of the departments in AKIM headquarters, such as the legal department or to the appropriate authority outside AKIM, such as the welfare bureaus around the country. Over time, we are seeing more requests and more of them requiring the help of professional staff like psychologists, paramedical staff, and behavioral specialists. To assist the families, we are hiring professionals.

Over the years, thanks to the operation of the hotline, unanswered issues raised awareness to the challenges families were facing and motivated AKIM Israel to start campaigns to change existing legislation in various life aspects. By doing so, we significantly improved the lives of people with intellectual disability and their families. In 2019, 23 parents volunteered at the hotline, 12 of them were Jewish, and 11 Arab, and hundreds of calls were received.

Operating the program requires managing the hotlines both in Hebrew and in Arabic, training the volunteers, and providing legal counseling and support. We need marketing actions so to spread the word about the hotline’s activity to more parents to children with intellectual disabilities. For monitoring purposes, the program runs regular segmentation and analysis of the issues raised to improve the service.