Faculty Profiles

Valued Lives: An Invitational Course on Social Role Valorization

FACULTy LIST

Elizabeth “Betsy” Neuville serves dual roles as Executive Director of the Keystone Institute, a US-based educational Institute, and Director of Keystone Institute India. She has well over 30 years of experience within Keystone as a human service worker, administrator, agency director, evaluator, educator, and personal advocate, as well as extensive experience in designing and developing supports for very vulnerable people, meaningful quality measurements, and extraordinary employee development programs.

Betsy first served as Executive Director of Keystone Human Services of Lancaster for 13 years, designing and directing supports for adults and children with developmental disabilities and/or mental disorders. She has assisted literally hundreds of people to leave institutions and establish themselves as valued and contributing members of their communities. Equally important, she has been involved with the closure of several large government institutions, and she established the use of person-centered processes to assist people to gain a vision of full, rich, community lives. Betsy led Keystone in gaining a reputation for successfully supporting people who many others had given up on, and has mentored a great number of passionate change agents to carry on this work. Over the next two decades, she has focused on consulting and training nationally and internationally on inclusive practice.

Betsy has worked extensively with the ideas of Normalization and Social Role Valorization, and provides training and consultation both nationally and internationally. She is fully accredited by the North American Social Role Valorization as a senior trainer of SRV. She has taught SRV and PASSING in Canada, across the United States, Ireland, the UK, Holland, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Romania, and the Republic of Moldova, and all over India. She studied under the mentorship of Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger, the developer and foremost proponent of Social Role Valorization, and has, in turn, mentored and supported a generation of people committed to personal human service to others. She remains closely personally connected to people who are vulnerable and holds particular interest in the historical treatment of people with disabilities.

She began involvement with using the tools and techniques of Person-Centered Planning in 1992 as a means to move people towards better lives, and has extensively studied and used the work of Beth Mount in Personal Futures Planning and Jack Pearpoint in PATH and MAPS. She has taught person centered planning techniques across North America, India, Romania, the republic of Moldova, and Azerbaijan. She has developed techniques which merge the use of traditional PC planning with Social Role Valorization and Model Coherency, increasing the likelihood that such processes will involve identifying and meeting true needs, as well as incorporating the use of valued social roles.

Betsy divides her time equally between India and the US. She holds a Master of Science in Disability Advocacy and Leadership, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and English from Bucknell University.

Dr. Sergiu Toma for the last 8 years of his professional experience has worked as a Psychologist, Educator and Consultant dedicated to supporting vulnerable people and their families in overcoming adverse social circumstances in Republic of Moldova. He has served for over 6 years as a Support Psychologist Coordinator at Keystone Human Services International Moldova Association within the Community for All – Moldova Program implemented on a national level. The Community for All Program focuses on transferring children and adults with severe mental disabilities from institutions back to their families or into community-based services, developing the legal framework for newly developed services, and improving the environment for better social inclusion of persons with intellectual disabilities. Sergiu has provided support for families of children with disabilities and young men in their crucial transition from institution to community life. He has also supported an Equal Access to Education Project implemented by Keystone Moldova, focused on inclusive educational practices for children with special educational needs.

Sergiu is also an educator on Social Role Valorization topics as part of the Keystone Moldova. He has gained his knowledge and practical skills through various training and consultations provided by the Keystone Institute and Keystone Human Services International in Moldova within the Community for All – Moldova Program. He has presented internationally on the subject of Social Role Valorization. Sergiu has worked on applying the principles of Social Role Valorization in areas such as initial and ongoing training for direct support workers within community based services for children and adults with disabilities, providing numerous person centered planning activities for children and adults in visioning a better future and ongoing support for their implementation and positive behavior support interventions for people manifesting various challenging behaviors.

Sergiu has a University degree in Pedagogy, a Master’s degree in Psychology and Educational Sciences (Moldova State University), and a PhD in Psychology.

Ms. Geeta Mondol serves as Project Lead for Keystone Institute India, providing leadership of multiple initiative including Community Lives, Unity Uttarakhand, and training and consultation across India. Geeta has decades of experience in working with, and being with, people with disabilities, and is also a parent of two young men, one of whom experiences autism.

She has been involved in conducting training on inclusion and integration of people with disabilities with many organizations in various parts of the country and abroad. Her early years involved working in a mainstream school helping include those with disabilities in the mainstream classrooms. Currently, she works within KII to create exit paths from government institutions so that some of society’s most rejected people can experience genuine community life.

Geeta was a pioneer by completing the inaugural Social Role Valorization (SRV) 1.0 training course in 2016, and assists to implement SRV within organizations and in the life of her family. She has participated in pilot projects using person-centered planning, and served as a member of multiple planning circles, both in training simulations and in bona fide planning sessions. She attended PASSING SRV Service Assessment training in the United States in 2019.

Leela Raj serves as Project Lead for Supported and Customized Employment, Curriculum Design for KII and is a seasoned training in Social Role Valorization and related disciplines and India and abroad. With a Master’s degree in Social Work, Leela has worked for more than a decade with families, people with disabilities and older adults. Leela has a passion for education and change agentry, and is committed to collaborative work building capacity and awareness. She first connected with the ideas of Social Role Valorization during her Master’s work in Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Kentucky, and has been working closely with us since her return to her home city of Mumbai. Her portfolio at KII includes developing high quality curricula for the development and formation of direct service workers as a developing role in India. Leela designs curricula rooted in inclusive practice and Social Role Valorization for professional coursework in disciplines like Psychology, Special Education, and Social Work. In addition, Leela heads up our supported employment initiative started in 2020, and is one of the only professionals in India with on-the-ground experience in using customized employment processes to help people with intellectual disability acquire livelihoods. Leela brings a great deal of experience and commitment with her, as a mentor, counselor, advocate, and activist working alongside young adults with developmental disability and their families.

Ranjana Chakraborty brings experience and deep commitment to her teaching and facilitation in Social Role Valorization and inclusive practice. A founding member of the All-India SRV Leadership Network, Ranjana joins the team of Associate Faculty for KII, working together across India for change. She is an experienced implementor of ideas related to SRV, and has particular expertise in evaluating service practices. Her role as a Board Member at Autism Society West Bengal, one of the leading organizations promoting the ideas of Social Role Valorization in India, as well as being a qualified special educator and family member of a person experiencing disability, bring both perspective and experience to bear as we move toward a different way to think about disability. From Kolkata, West Bengal, Ranjana’s background in microbiology brings diversity of thinking and rigor to her approach. As well, Ranjana’s advanced training in Social Role Valorization in US and India are supplemented by her passion for change.

Dr. Nidhi Singhal has two decades of training and experience in working with persons with autism. She has received her PhD in Clinical Psychology from University of Delhi. Her clinical approach is integrative with a focus on cognitivebehavioral and solution-focused therapies.

At AFA, she carries out screening and diagnostic assessments, counsel’s adults with autism; designs & executes individual and group programs for parents; addresses impact of autism on self, marriage, and family, social & work relationships. Dr. Singhal is also involved in planning and execution of long and short-term training programs for individuals with autism, their parents, professionals, and other organizations. She is a member of the International Steering Committee developing a WHO ICF Core Set for ASD and is also recognized as an expert on autism by the Rehabilitation Council of India.

Dr. Singhal is passionate about creating supports for vulnerable people which are respectful and assist people to have valued roles as contributing members of society, with full, rich, and meaningful lives. She graduated from the inaugural SRV course held in Delhi in 2016, and has been teaching and using the ideas both at Action for Autism, and in training programs elsewhere.

She attended a PASSING service evaluation course in the United States and has participated on a PASSING test evaluation in India, and she represented India at the International SRV Association summit in Ireland in 2018.

Chitra Paul As an ally of the Autistic community, an Inclusion Advocate, a Special Educator, and a parent of an autistic teenager, Chitra dons many hats.

As a parent, Chitra has not just been an ardent advocate for her son but has also been passionate about supporting other families through their journey with autism. In the process of this endeavour, she has moved away from her previous career in Clinical Microbiology, where she held an advanced degree in Medical Microbiology. She is an active volunteer in the Autism parenting space in Bangalore and facilitates multiple online support and resource sharing groups where she equips parents with skills necessary to support their children.

Her experience with her son and the families that she has worked with triggered her interest in Inclusion and the rights of children with disabilities. She went on to complete an MA in Special Education and Inclusion from the University of Northampton and has supported various inclusion efforts in Bangalore and nationally. She believes in the moto “Nothing for us, without us” and strives towards including the voices of autistic people in the decisions that are being made for them. Chitra has served as a panelist in multiple events, conducted workshops, organized inclusion and autism awareness events developed materials for autism awareness in multiple languages and advised start-up organizations in the field of disabilities and inclusion.

Chitra is the Founder/Director of All-Inclusive Foundation, an organization working to create more inclusive spaces for marginalized individuals, including people with disabilities. She has also received advanced training in the ideas of Social Role Valorization and is a member of the All-India SRV Network.

Sudha S. Nair is passionate about the work she does alongside your people with disabilities She has been in the field of Special Education for the last 27 years, the last 17 years especially in Inclusive Education. She has had the responsibilities of setting up an Autism Unit in a Special Needs Centre as well as a Learning Support Unit in a Mainstream School during her employment in Dubai. As a self-employed professional in India, she has been actively involved in working side by side with parents as well as school educators and counselors to work for and champion her neurodiverse students. Her introduction and further exploration of the themes of SRV has added a valuable dimension to her commitment and thinking, especially while designing programmes for her students.

She has recently founded the SuDhi Learning Centre which aims to be a training hub as well as to co-create shared spaces for belonging and interpersonal identification in the community. She attended Social Role Valorization 3.0 in 2019, and has been an active member of the All -India SRV Association since its inception. She has had a great deal of experience incorporating SRV thinking into her work, and has introduced many others to the ideas.

She loves reading (or should we say, collecting books!), pottering around her little garden, playing with her two adorable pets, dabbles in sketching, when she isn’t working or being brought up by the two young ladies, she gave birth to.