our beginning

The Nika Project got its start from the moment novice filmmaker Suzanne Cross walked into the Technology Resource Center of Marin in 2013. She and her husband, John Simpson, had been working with extraordinary schools in a rural area of eastern South Africa and were making a documentary about the humble beginnings of special education. Starting under a single tree, the school grew to 4 trees as special needs students, with nowhere else to go, began to come to receive education. Their documentary, “Under Four Trees” inspired Suzanne to wonder if modern day technology tools would be as effective in this setting - a school with minimal resources, no running water, no internet, and no electricity except for the residential areas.

These questions inspired them as well as a team of professionals to travel to this school to see the possibilities of introducing technology tools to students who had no previous exposure to smart phones, tablets or projectors. Using donated tools from the bay area, the Nika team members traveled to this remarkable school for 2 summers. The results were extraordinary. It demonstrated the power of these modern tools to allow us to, in less than 8 days, provide an ipad with selected applications that used audio and video support for teaching.

how we grew

The members of Nika wanted to share their experiences and the power of donated modern day technology tools with the International Community and presented at major conferences around the world including:

As a result of these presentations, Nika grew to an International community of learning and sharing. Our projects explored different languages, cultures and previous exposure and use with technology to advance communication and education. Before the pandemic, Nika held in-person projects in Malaysia, Nigeria, UAE, Peru, India, and Indonesia, affecting hundreds of underserved special needs children, their schools, and their communities.

The power of Nika is in the people, but without access to technology tools, many teachers and students would not have the experience to see the power of communication and interactive teaching. Nika is so grateful for our partnerships with technology companies that participated in Nika’s mission of training and exposure. These companies were generous in their donations of:

  • Direct donations/reduced pricing of equipment

  • Licensure for teacher and student use

  • Mounting and access equipment

As our projects grew, so did our organization and those who are involved with us. Nika could not exist without the generosity of our volunteers. We continue to build our community of supporters around the world!

our current projects

Nika currently has joined forces with San Francisco State University and the AAC for ALL! Credential program. This program was developed by Nancy Robinson and Gloria Soto and addresses the shortage of professionals in speech-language pathology and special education to meet the linguistic, academic, and social needs of an increasing number of children with disabilities who have a home language other than English, and benefit from various types of Augmentative and Alternative Communication. Nika has partnered with this program to provide the most comprehensive, hands-on partnership with other University programs, trainings and communities in culturally diverse communities all over the world. We continue to expand our network of AAC and technology trainings to support the future of education.

The pandemic revealed a series of challenges for us as an organization and Nika rose up to meet these challenges by expanding our remote digital access to technology tools. We found a multitude of resources that could be shared and implemented remotely with a now global method of communication. This enables us as an organization to drastically increase our outreach and ongoing support for our target projects.

Nika also expanded our use of tools that work on any device to address sustainability. We fully realize that tech tools have a limited life - our focus is on sustainable cloud-based software that can be used on any platform in order to allow ANYONE of ANY AGE speaking ANY LANGUAGE to teach ANY CONTENT.