Giving the gift of the ARTS back to the special needs community.
Last Friday 25 special needs parents were given a gift. A gift of the arts. We were treated to a night at the symphony. We were treated to the symphony by Valerie Bontrager, the director of education and community engagement at The Phoenix Symphony. She is a champion...
Building Inclusive Communities Part 2
The next part of his talk focused on how we support these adults and he gave us real world examples of how to pull them back into the community. First he said that we have to ask them what they want. When his company receives a new client they are given a folder...
Building Inclusive Communities Part 1
The speaker on the second day was Kirk Hinleman and he has authored a book called Intentional Teaming. His goal is to move from system-centered thinking to a citizen-centered presence. That it was all well and good that we removed these people from an institution, but...
The Independent Living Movement
On the first day of class, they brought in a self-advocate. I don’t think I have ever met a person with more abbreviations after her name. Dr. Ficchi is a self-advocate who focuses on setting the bar higher for people with disabilities and her dissertation is...
Arizona’s History with the disabled
To peek into Arizona’s history we had speaker Pat Volle. He worked in Arizona with differently-abled people for over 40 years. Institutions like Pennhurst were everywhere, even in Arizona. Actually, two of them still exist. Arizona State Hospital This hospital was...
History of Disability in America
This is a difficult subject to cover. Our history here is an unpleasant one. In the beginning we were not kind to those with disabilities. We placed them into institutions. We forgot about them. We classified them as other, and we allowed them to be treated as...
Pilot Parent Class 2019-2020
In 1970 the Pilot Parent movement started in Omaha Nebraska. The mother of a child who had a diagnosis of Down Syndrome created a 1:1 peer mentoring program for parents raising children with Down Syndrome. In 1974 awareness of this program quickly spread there was a...
The change one person can make…
Today I had a meeting with Marc Garica, President and CEO of Visit Mesa. Marc has had a long history of working with different cities to increase tourism for their businesses and communities. Now he is at Visit Mesa and is making groundbreaking changes to Mesa’s...
My Self-Care Wake Up Call
I am a huge proponent of self-care. I care about self-care so much that I created D.A.M.E.S. a self-care platform for mothers raising special needs children. However sometimes it’s easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk. About three months ago I got serious...
The Importance of Communication
Jackson is non-verbal. He has apraxia of speech which is a motor speech disorder. When Jackson was younger he had speech… he could say words at 2 that he still cannot say today at 6. I remember watching this fade… I remember a series of ear infections during which...