As most of you reading this know, Fionnathan Productions is an innovative, son-and-father led, community driven project exploring how far we can go toward creating for and with Fionn a ‘great life’ (as he defines it). And now, another year of remarkable accomplishments for this young man (and a few big failures, as usual) is complete. This year saw our 10th anniversary. A great year, a dismal year, in so many moments (mostly great, by our calculation). Fionn turned 29. He will be half Jonathan’s age in 2027. (Do the math, if you must.) We divided this report into the following categories. Education & Research, Advocacy & People, The Arts & Travel, Abundance & What’s Ahead. We hope you enjoy reading it, and feel free to give us feedback about any of it.
In 2024, when Fionn was serving his 6-month internship in Brussels. We felt it was time to give serious consideration to how best to scale our innovative approach to supporting people with Down syndrome to create a great life.
How could we help people to make their goals happen, if they didn’t first understand their rights in society?
How could we help people avoid the trap of stopping there, without seeing that only when you contribute meaningfully, and your contributions are meaningfully recognised, can you ever hope to have an equal part to play?
Near the middle of the year, we received word from Rethink Ireland that our application for funding from the Department of Children, Disability & Equality was approved. The six-figure sum is the largest grant we’ve received, 60% bigger than the one we had last year, to develop our Creative Approaches to Practical Community Advocacy (CAPCA) Course.
With this, we were able to repeat CAPCA online, for two, 6-week cycles. This new version had 50 participants (half of whom have Down syndrome). We created a new fionnathan webiste, and used it to host new eLearning modules for the course. This development will allow us great flexibility to deliver citizenship training to people in any location. Already in 2025 we had participants from Finland, Spain, France and Canada join us.
Even more exciting is that the funding stretches to provide us the means to run our first Abundance pilot. We aim to show that Supported Entrepreneurship™ can help drive a worldwide social inclusion movement.
To accomplish all this, we brought on our super-colleague, Markus Vahala. We couldn’t do it without him. And we hired a Design Team, made up of previous CAPCA participants who agreed to plan out their own Abundance MicroBusiness Pilots.
Through numerous meetings with Galway City Council, Down Syndrome Galway, and other community groups, we have planned some big events. The first was a pop-up craft shop in Eyre Square, offering hand-made Christmas gifts and providing us a first meeting with the public. More to follow.
We're raising money to spread love all around the world through our work. Help us continue on this journey.
