Give Children with Disabilities an Arts Education

Over the past few months Epic Arts has been focused on protecting the most vulnerable and like the rest of the world we’ve had to reorganize to ensure our survival.

Covid-19 cases in Cambodia have remained low and the government have taken steps to limit community transmission. The bigger challenge our communities face at the moment is economic, with many people reporting losing income and jobs.

In April GlobalGiving made the decision to change donations from ‘restricted’ to ‘unrestricted’ this allowed us to use unspent donations to help us survive throughout the uncertainty of the pandemic.

We’d like to update you on what’s changed at Epic Arts since you heard from us last and how your donations have helped us survive this uncertain time.

Supporting the vulnerable

We're in this together, that's why we're supporting some of the most vulnerable children with disabilities and their families in Kampot, with emergency food and hygiene supplies. Since March we’ve supplied over 100 people and children with disabilities with emergency covid relief, including food parcels, accessible information and hygiene supplies.

Education

In late March our classrooms were closed under the Ministry of Education's decree to close all schools and vocational training centres in Cambodia. Since then our Teachers and Social Worker have been hard at work visiting families every week to deliver home school sessions and to provide support to families being impacted by the social challenges caused by Covid-19.

In the last week has been the government has announced that schools will be allowed to open again soon. We hope that we’ll be greeting our students into our classrooms in the very near future.

Wishing all of our friends and supporters around the world good health and safety!

Please consider donating again to support our work helping the vulnerable communities of Kampot

Thank you, 

The Epic Arts Team

Women with disabilities and the students you funded are making a noise in Cambodia and saying “no more” to inequality in our latest original song and music video “Rise Up”

On International Women’s day 2020 we released a new video which included students from our Inclusive Education Programme, which you helped to fund!

The video was part of a community arts project which worked with women, girls and mothers affected by disability across Cambodia, from Epic Arts and other disability sector NGOs.

Through creative storytelling workshops we turned women’s stories of discrimination & abuse into a powerful, catchy original song with an inspiring music video featuring over 50 people with disabilities.

We believe in equality, inclusion and diversity, so of course the video included a huge range of people from all walks of life, from Epic Arts special education students to a Cambodian Vlogger.

Thanks to your donations we have the opportunity for our students to take part in projects like this, which not only creates inclusive projects and brings positive representation of people with disabilities in the media.

Most importantly, students involvement in these creative projects increases their confidence and pride as they work alongside professional dancers and well-known figures.

‘Rise Up’ video has been a big success and had over 130k views in Cambodia in just a week.

We wanted to encourage and inspire viewers to challenge their perceptions around disability and discrimination and to also inspire people with and without disabilities to rise up from the violence and advocate for equal rights. We believe ‘Rise up’ is doing just that as it’s had over 130k views and over 2k shares on Facebook and numerous supportive comments.

Click the link to watch the video and see if you can spot our students.

Once again, thank you for supporting Epic Arts