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Premises adapted to employ and to train handicapped adults

Seguin Services, a nonprofit known for its professionalism in the Chicago area, is developing accommodation potential for the employment and vocational training of hundreds of handicapped adults every year.
Projects listing

Social and Employment

Place
Cicero, Illinois, United States

Sponsor
Patricia Podczerwinski

Grant(s)
€20,000 to the Selection Committee at 2011/06/28

Project leader

Services Seguin Inc.

"Seguin Services has been working for many years with the communities of the Chicago area to hire and integrate handicapped adults.I am impressed by its professionalism and its commitment, and extremely proud that the Veolia Environnement Foundation is coming alongside."

Patricia Podczerwinski

Based in the town of Cicero, Illinois, west of Chicago, Seguin Services aids the integration, trains and empowers the handicapped adults and takes charge of sidelined children so that they can become fully fledged members of society and recover their self respect.Created in 1976, the nonprofit took its name from Edouard Seguin, a 19th century French psychiatrist and pioneer in the education of mentally handicapped children.It offers support to 600 children and adults in more than 50 communities each year. Seguin seeks foster families for these children and gives them educational and medical care, takes charge of their emotional problems, their behavioral difficulties and their ailments.For the adults, Seguin proposes jobs and vocational training, plus housing assistance to enable them to live more autonomously and rejoin mainstream society.

Nine new classrooms and a new educational hothouse

Carr Center, the Seguin Services vocational training center, has become obsolete through the years and needs complete refurbishment in order to offer the handicapped persons better conditions for learning, access and security.The reconstruction of the Carr Center's 15,000 sq m also helps boost the accommodation capacity from 350 to 400 persons per year, with nine new classrooms equipped for training aimed at better professional integration of these adults.An adjacent structure has been added, Seguinworks Garden Center, an educational hothouse to employ mentally handicapped adults.

The Veolia Foundation is supporting this major structure to build one of the nine classrooms, hoping, like Seguin Services and its financial partners - the Illinois Chamber of Commerce, the City of Chicago, the Foundation of the Chamber of Commerce of Chicago, and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Foundation - to lower the unemployment rate of handicapped persons in the State of Illinois, which is 70% today.