In our society, when we talk about handicap, we often think about motor disability or intellectual disability - Even if this population is the most important part among disabled people, we do not have to forget other kind of disabilities, which make the autonomy and social inclusion and participation very complicated and sometimes not realistic. This project is talking about children with visual impairment, and especially very young children for whom our organisations try to give social inclusion and social participation for a better quality of life and to make them citizens in its own right. Our organisations are working on early intervention, from the early age of these children. This is very important for a better assimilation of what will give social inclusion and social participation. We support these very young children from birth, and also their families and relatives, in all the aspects of their life. This support is provided to each child as a whole : body skills development, autonomy in daily life, in the movings, in school pathway, and psychological support, and by a multidisciplinary team composed of social workers, professionals on rehabilitation, orthoptists, occupational therapists, psychologists.This support at very young age (often before 3 years old) is crucial for the future of the child. After long experiences of support, we know that a lack a this age is providing teenagers without autonomy, and without social inclusion and participation. The objective of our project is to favor the exchange of practices between different organisations in Europe to put in advance the methodologies, tools, and support provided, either to consider them as a good practice for blind or partially sighted children, either to admit that some practices are not the best for these children. Such exchanges in Europe will enable the professionals to improve their knowledge in the support of these children, for their benefit in the aim to improve the autonomy, the social inclusion and social participation of blind and partially sighted people, as citizen in its own right. Participants involved in this project are professionals including social workers, professionals on rehabilitation (mobility instructors, daily living instructors), psychologists, occupational therapists, orthoptists. Activities will include 2 mobilities. The first mobility in Angers (France) will enable participants to improve their knowledge about the different practices in Europe, but will also enable workshops and visits, especially on animal mediation. The second mobility in Vienna (Austria) will introduce different clinical cases for a good comprehension of best practices on early intervention, but also workshops dedicated to Echolocation, activity for the auntonomy of children with visual impairment. Out of these 2 mobilities, a steering committee will organise the different activities - we will use online system (skype, zoom) to keep contact with all the partners, and to provide all the information required to prepare the mobilities. As results, the partnership will discover and exchange good practices by sharing everyone's experiences in order to communicate them to professionals and partners (parents, schools, crèches, etc.) but also we will think about and identify strategies for supporting very young children: what are the areas to be tackled? at what stages of life? how to transmit them, what pedagogy to use? what tools at our disposal? What tools should be invented? All these results will be provided in formal presentations, as much for the presentation of practices, as for clinical cases, which will provide a guide on the practicies concerning early intervention in Europe.The impact of this project is to improve the social inclusion and participation, as well as the professional inclusion, of young children with visual impairment - this is an investment from the early age for a big impact at adulthood.

In all the EU countries, rehabilitation centres specialised in the support of children with visual impairment have more and more cases of children with central visual disorders and a low vision. Our organisations have already developed methodologies and procedure for the support of children for which the visual impairment is due to a dysfunctioning of the eye, as an organ. When the visual impairement is caused by a cererbral background, the impact for children is totally different for the daily life and compensation means we use usually doesn't work. There are more and more cases and this constat is due to the improvement of medical knowledge, and that we didn't identify before the causes of their visual impairment. This is a real issue for all the rehabilitation organisations in Europe, which want to develop/set up a process of evaluation and support, as a standard for our organisations. Our experience with these children show us that they need to have a specific approach in the comprehension of the impact of their disabilities and in the support modalities to set up. And despite the improvement of scientific knowledge on this question, modalities of support are too often some individual processes, without concertation and very isolated, locally. It is important to work together on the development of a coherent and pluridisciplinary process at EU level. In consequence, the objectives of CVI Project were to gather all the experiences of the partners and to develop a common process and common tools to improve the support of visually impaired children with cerebral visual impairment. The partnership is composed of 8 organisations from Europe and one from Quebec, all are specialists in the rehabilitation of visually impaired people. Among the 9 partners, 5 of them are french speaking (MFAM, IRSAM, CRDV from France, IRSA from Belgium and INLB from Longueuil in Quebec). The 4 other organisations are coming from Spain (2), The Netherlands and Croatia. The partnership has developed : - a protocol of assessment for a pluridisciplinary assessment of central visual disorders, working with different professionals : ophtalmologists, orthoptists, neuropsychologists, working with existing tools already used, and adapted to the group when necessary. - A handbook to give the knowledge of the process, the referral to the tools used, and how it works, with the contents of the tools developed in the project.- A questionnaire for relatives and surrounding of the children to support the assessment of the children. -An individual passport in which could be described simply for the environnement the impact of disorders in the life of the child, and also with a key card, a template layed out in A5 format to know more about the context of the child concerned. - A guide (called training course) to enable the professionals to use in a suitable way the outcomes of the project for the benefit of these children. The impact of this project is very important and the number of professionals concerned by these developments is huge. with difficulty to count approximately this figure, we know that at least in the francophone network (composed of 33 organisations in francophone countries), this is approximately 5000 professionnals concerned near or far by the developments. We can say that the impact is very huge in consideration with also the other EU countries