Over the past three years, Prajñādhara has been certifying practitioners in Arts Based Therapy. The third batch will be certified in February 2020. Under the tutelage of Prajñādhara, the course has been hugely popular amongst students and the organisations they have worked in. From Prajñādhara’s first to second batch, the regional diversity of trainees increased by nearly 100% from 6 regions in south India in 2017 to 11 regions across the country in 2018 and 2019. With special educators and psychologists being a sizeable population of professionals taking the course in 2017, the years 2018 and 2019 saw professionals from a host of fields like physiotherapists, mentors, social workers, school counselors, yoga teachers and art educators take the course. Organisations benefiting special needs and vulnerable groups saw a range of professionals with diverse skills working with beneficiaries and bringing the value of therapeutic arts practices to bring transformative changes to their lives.

Based on Gitanjali and Sumathi’s experience of teaching arts based therapy to over sixty practitioners, both felt the need to design and implement a course that looks specifically at social inclusion through the Arts. API is a result of their vision.

Rather than looking at the arts as a reparative method of working with the difficulties faced by special needs and vulnerable groups through ABT, they saw the need to make an intervention at a foundational level by encouraging dialogue through relationships and mutual understanding between mainstream and special needs populations to facilitate social inclusion. By erasing the artificial boundaries of misunderstandings, ways of learning and communication, cultural and occupational differences between these communities and introducing a new vocabulary of connection through the creative arts, API aims at creating something beautiful- more inclusive spaces across India.