Here’s an example of what we do…

Jake has cerebral palsy. He comes to the Champion Centre once a week with his mum for his early intervention sessions lasting about three hours each time.

His team at the Centre has a physiotherapist, an early intervention teacher, a speech and language therapist, an early childhood teacher, a music specialist; a computer supported learning specialist and a social worker. Outside the Centre he also has an Education Support Worker who goes with him to his community early childhood centre.

Jake is about to go to school and it is really important that the team help the school understand all that they have learned about Jake since he first started coming to the Champion Centre as a little baby. His team want the school to know what he can do, what he likes, what his temperament is, what his challenges are, how he learns best, and what sorts of supports he is going to need at school. The ‘transition to school report’ is huge and it is put together by the whole team. Each member of the team reviews the work they have done with Jake and drafts their own section of the report, placing it on the server where other team members can access it. Gradually over a period of weeks, the report is built up as each therapist adds their part, working with Jake’s mum to be sure that everyone is on the same page and in agreement about what the school needs to know.

Eventually, the report is complete and ready to be edited, checked and prepared to be sent with a photo of the delicious Jake on the front, cheeky smile and all, so everyone at school will know what a great kid he is and be ready to welcome and include him in the life of the school. Without the ICT support of Techsoup, creating Jake’s report would be so much harder!

The Champion Centre is the largest and longest running centre-based programme for infants and preschool children with disabilities in New Zealand. Founded more than thirty years ago, we now have more than 60 staff members and almost 200 families in our service at any one time. That makes for lots of report writing, searching the internet for the best and most up-to-date professional information, and of course communication between professionals and between therapists and families through e-mail.

To make it all work, we needed an efficient server that therapists can log into and work on their reports, sharing drafts and contributing to a final integrated document. We also needed the individual computers upgraded to run on the same operating system using the much more efficient 2010 Microsoft Office suite.

These individual computers are used by our therapists for all their work and for the administrative staff to search for new sources of philanthropic funding to help us close the huge gap between what the government gives us and what it costs us to run this world-class early intervention service in Christchurch.  

The gift from TechSoup has been fabulous! The new server has enabled us to retire several dinosaur computers that couldn’t keep up, to put in a new server, and finally get most of us into the 21st century!

Champion Centre Chairperson

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