The six-week course is run by Enabling Love and Friendship (ELF), a non-profit organisation, to help people with their communication skills, develop friendships and learn about emotions and their sexuality.
The course is facilitated by New Zealand disability researcher Barbara Fogarty, who has more than 20 years’ experience working with people living with disabilities.
Ms Fogarty said ELF chief executive Joshua Perry, who is also her son, spent two years developing the pilot course and hoped to make it nationally accessible.
"We’re really hoping to build off this," she said.
"It’s kind of been a fairly new way because we’ve wanted to do this for a few years but we hadn’t actually got the funding and we hadn’t quite had the outreach network."
The course had already received $4500 from the Ministry of Social Development social cohesion fund and a further $2000 from the Otago Community Trust to get under way, Ms Fogarty said.
Each week different guest speakers covered a variety of topics, including making eye contact and issues to do with consent and online safety, that families of people living with disabilities found difficult to talk about.
Ms Fogarty said it was important to make people feel at home and have lots of laughs along the way.
"We’ve done a lot of role play, which is really good because it kind of helps people relax a wee bit and it’s a bit of fun."
In the pilot, about 18 people with a range of disabilities from autism to Down’s syndrome to ADHD had benefited from the course.
Eight regions across the country, including Invercargill, Christchurch, Nelson, Tauranga and Auckland, had expressed an interest in hosting the course, she said.
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