Saint Lazarus Centre for Adults with Disabilities (Kentro AmeA “Agios Lazaros”) – OID: E10045250

Saint Lazarus Centre for Adults with Disabilities (Kentro AmeA “Agios Lazaros”), OID E10045250, is a community-based non-profit organisation in Larnaca, Cyprus, with 30 years of experience supporting 67 adults with intellectual disabilities across Day Services, Vocational Rehabilitation and Supported Living.

Our strategic direction is to develop Saint Lazarus as an Experts by Experience Real-World Living Lab, embedded in our everyday services. We offer consortia a real-life environment where services, technologies, information and environments can be co-designed, tested, adapted and validated with adults with intellectual disabilities across the pathway: LEARN – WORK – LIVE – PARTICIPATE.

We are developing a structured Experts by Experience capacity in which people progressively move from participant to tester, reviewer, co-designer and contributor to evaluation.

A core competence is cognitive accessibility and real-world validation. We first test whether a person actually understands and can use the information, service, technology or environment. We intervene only where a barrier is shown. Validation observations are structured across five dimensions: comprehension, recognition, task performance, preference and support required. Where a barrier is identified, the simplest adequate adaptation is introduced and the solution is tested again.

We also treat ethics as part of validation: when does technology genuinely support autonomy, when can it create new dependency, who decides, is there meaningful choice, and what human support should remain? Supported decision-making, safeguarding, dignity and privacy are integrated into this work.

Current demonstrators and development areas include:

• CityHome 5 – a planned inclusive smart-home demonstrator in Larnaca for five adults with intellectual disabilities, combining adaptive building reuse, New European Bauhaus principles, energy efficiency, assistive and smart-home technology, AI where appropriate, accessible information and supported decision-making. Until operational, our existing Supported Living service provides a real-world testbed.

• Understandable City – testing whether AI-enabled and digital public services are genuinely understandable and usable by people with intellectual disabilities. Potential fields include municipal applications, mobility information, appointments, AI assistants, maps, ticketing, cultural information, emergency messages and public websites. The approach is: real service → test → identify the barrier → simplest adequate adaptation → retest.

• Inclusive Work Lab – real-world validation of technologies and approaches for inclusive employment, including accessible work instructions, AI-supported learning, prompting, job matching, workplace adaptations and skills assessment. A further ambition is to develop accessibility review itself as a meaningful skill and potential paid role for Experts by Experience.

An outcome-evidence layer across these areas is being co-developed the LifePath platform, linking participation and real-world testing with structured evidence on progress, support needs and outcomes over time.

Saint Lazarus has established practical European experience. We are Erasmus+ KA120 Adult Education accredited for 2024–2027 and have implemented learning mobilities and professional exchanges with organisations in Italy, Greece, Spain and Germany. Our European cooperation focuses on inclusion, vocational skills, supported and independent living, cognitive accessibility, community participation and transfer of good practice. We are also strengthening our European quality capacity through engagement with EPR and the progressive introduction of practices aligned with EQUASS principles.

Beyond mobility, Saint Lazarus is increasingly involved in European consortium development, partner searches and proposal preparation, including Horizon Europe.

We can contribute to consortia through end-user participation, co-design, cognitive-accessibility testing, real-world pilots, Experts by Experience participation, validation of AI, digital and assistive technologies, supported decision-making, safeguarding and outcome observation.

We seek to join Horizon Europe consortia as a beneficiary, with meaningful responsibilities for end-user participation, cognitive accessibility, real-world pilot implementation and validation, while contributing to ethics, safeguarding and inclusive participation.

We are particularly interested in collaboration with universities, cities, research organisations, AI and digital-service providers, architecture and smart-home partners, employment and skills organisations, mobility actors, cultural organisations and social-innovation partners.