Ezer Mizion’s “Active Nurturing Playground” project has long become a synonym for “success” in its important goal of identifying children with minimal developmental challenges at an early age and helping them progress within their own pre-school framework. 
The program provides a response for the spectrum of developmental fields: gross and fine motor skills, sensory issues, and language/communication. The program also addresses the highly important socio-emotional area.
The program’s achievements, as they were presented at a gathering marking another year of the program’s activity, are quite impressive, both on the national and municipal level.
Since the 14 years since its inception, over 80,000 children all over Israel have benefitted from the project. In Bnei Brak alone, about 300 preschool teachers and rebbes and 18,000 children have taken part in the program. At least as many additional children in the city benefited from the program’s follow-up operation by the educational staff.
Thanks to the program, some 2,300 children were identified early as having developmental challenges and were treated within their ordinary educational framework. In Bnei Brak in particular, an early-bird program was introduced in the day-care centers, and as a result of the resounding success of this intervention, the idea has been adopted in other cities as well.
Rabbi Chanoch Zeivert, mayor of Bnei Brak, visited Ezer Mizion’s Jacob Fried National Center, accompanied by senior municipal staff, including Rabbi Yisrael Drenger, the Mayor’s chief of staff, and Rabbi Yosef Gerelitz, the mayor’s advisor on matters of youth and social services. At the visit, the mayor and his entourage were given an extensive overview of the project and were deeply impressed by its scope, professionalism, effectiveness, and suitability. He expressed the hope that the Municipality would be able to continue collaborating with Ezer Mizion to expand the Active Nurturing Playground’s absorption into the local schools, for the benefit of the city’s children and the Jewish people’s future.
http://www.ezermizion.org/pdfs/ANP1.pdf
http://www.ezermizion.org/pdfs/ANP2.pdf
