Inclusion for All
Creator: Amanda Stark
I wrote a blogpost about what I learned and observed in my time at You’re with Us when I was paired with William, a peer with a disability.
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Goals
In working with You’re With Us, my group aimed to create meaningful one on one relationships with William, a peer with a disability, and spread the organization’s central idea of the value of inclusion through social media and blog posts. To support the goals of the organization, my group wrote about our time with William to show young adults with and without disabilities what it is like to work with You’re With Us to create a friendly and inclusive environment. Our social media posts via Instagram and blog posts will reach a few different audiences including families of those with disabilities, students interested in volunteering, and donors. In the social media and blog posts I created, I tried to make content that would be informative and meaningful for all three audiences. I aimed to showcase the positive impact of the mentoring on both peers with and without disabilities. I believe that You’re With Us allows for invaluable opportunities for abled peers to see the abilities of disabled individuals. Young adults without disabilities can benefit from friendships made through You’re With Us just as much as their disabled peers. Families of those with disabilities are the main audience and the organization was created to help them find opportunities for inclusion. Because my sister has autism, I know that families of young adults with disabilities have many organizations and resources offered to them. However, unlike other organizations, You’re With Us is unique in that it provides opportunities for a sense of belonging and inclusion for disabled young adults as opposed to others which focus on learning opportunities instead. A sense of belonging is a valuable thing to have that can change one’s perspective. In my posts, I wanted to emphasize this to encourage families of disabled people to give You’re With Us a chance. Lastly, donors to the organization could benefit from seeing positive outcomes for both sides of the relationship. Seeing how beneficial this organization can be for all parties involved should hopefully encourage potential donors to give money to the cause.
Feedback and Evaluation
My group currently does not have the feedback and evaluation that would have been ideal because our service timeline was pushed back a lot, due to issues with group pairing and cancellations because of school breaks and inclement weather. At the moment, success is difficult to measure because we do not have any quantifiable data from social media post engagement or other similar areas for people with different service learning responsibilities. However, I have been successful in having an impact with a one on one relationship with William and learning more about the impact of inclusion. The impact of reaching one person can be very difficult to measure, but it can be the most meaningful. Furthermore, my work up to this point should lead to measurable success because it followed the guidelines of the other successful posts by the organization. Because we were unable to meet with William until recently, we also have not yet gotten feedback on social media or blog posts from people at You’re With Us. However, during our activity with William, we got feedback from him in verbal and nonverbal cues expressing which aspects he liked and did not like. This feedback allowed me to create my own self evaluation of service and I believe that we were successful in making an impact. William’s big smile when I threw the ball high up in the air was proof enough that my service had meaning for him and he was happy to spend time with my group and I. We will hopefully be getting feedback from You’re With Us and posting the blogs and social media posts after our second activity with William.
The situation of not being able to start doing activities with William until the end of the semester was the largest challenge my group faced. We were all very eager and excited to start service, but due to many reasons, this was postponed later than any of us expected. In the beginning of the semester, we were mainly communicating with Michael Plansky through Kylie, the student coordinator, and it took a few weeks for us to be paired with William. Next semester, I think that it would be very useful if the service learning group was immediately paired with William and they could have a meeting with his parents and a representative from You’re With Us within the first month of school. This would allow the start of service activities to be expedited. Also, we were unable to meet certain weekends because of school breaks or weather, and this was especially impactful because we were already starting doing activities later in the semester.
Another smaller challenge that we faced was that William’s interests do not align with my group’s interests as well as they did to that of the previous service learning group. Kelly, Eva, and I are not very sporty or athletic, and we do not play video games. William’s two favorite activities last semester were basketball and FIFA. Although we are not as familiar or experienced with these activities, we agreed to mentor William and brainstorm other things we could do with him. It was challenging trying to figure out logistics of activities that we have not done on our own, and may have been easier mentoring a different student. However, William was left without a mentor at the end of last semester and Eva, Kelly, and I wanted to best fulfill the needs of the organization, so we worked through the difficulty to make sure William could have another great experience this semester.