West Jakarta: 100 urban poor home mentoring visits

We arrive at a home and knock on the door. No one opens the door. We think, “We had made an appointment, didn’t we?” The reality is that even when the family previously confirmed the visit time, sometimes no one is home at that time. The child with disability may be at another house being looked after by a neighbor. Or, the parents are away at work leaving the child home alone until perhaps lunch time when mother may return home briefly during her lunch break to feed the child.

Time and again, we are reminded that these kinds of challenges cannot be simply solved by our planning and ideas. Yet, we can still do something to improve the lives of children with disabilities. Several years of visiting these families in their home have afforded us the opportunity to journey with these families in a personal and meaningful way. Knowing each particular situation, we seek to practically encourage the parent while also making space for the parent to share their grief and pain that they experience.

One example is the family of Dee. Since the passing of Dee’s mother in 2025, her father had been working non-stop in order to make ends meet financially. But because Dee is not able to go to the toilet independently, her father quit working in order to fully care for Dee. In the coming months, we hope to help the father create and implement a step-by-step plan that would enable Dee develop greater independence in using the toilet with the hope that her father will eventually be able to return to work. These interventions and planning processes always take into account the parents’ capacities and the responsibilities they carry alongside their work. In this way, we can continue to holistically help children with disabilities in the context of their families.

We see the impact of our visits. One child was able to move to a specialized facility that provided housing and education to children with disabilities. This fulfilled his mother’s long-held desire to see her son have better developmental opportunities.  To get to this point, we together with the mother explored suitable facilities and eventually found one outside the city of Jakarta. We then accompanied the mother to the intake interview. Now several months later, the mother shares with us photos of her son enjoying himself and growing at that facility. The mother is deeply grateful for our support citing that she would not have been able to make this happen on her own.

An exciting development in 2026 is that we at Bina Berdaya Bangsa forged a collaboration Bentara Campus in which student interns go with us on these home visits thus expanding the reach and capacity of the home visit program. This collaboration direcly supports our 2026 goal of sharpening and expanding the types of plans and interventions we are able to offer to the families. The students help create individualized plans (like Dee’s toilet training) towards greater independence and then work on the intervention together with the families.

How beautiful it would be if a small but meaningful change could take place in every family we visit. Will you consider being part of the change be financially supporting these home visits?