As Executive Director of the Special Needs Network (SNN) I was both excited and proud to lauch our inaugural Open House event on November 13th. We have just opened our first ever permanent headquarters in Ottawa, and the Open House was an opportunity to make ourselves better known to the community, as well as to renew past relationships and develop new ones.
People often wonder why it is that I have spent the past ten years, in some capacity or another, working to ensure a better quality of life for youth (and all persons) with developmental disabilties. Well, I'm afraid it is not much of a story. One of my first volunteer/work experiences involved kids with developmental challenges, and it struck me that very little was being done to assist them, so I figured I'd better try to do something about it!
Unlike many other "disability groups", persons with intellectual challenges do not have the benefit of prominent self-advocates as leaders. No "Stephen Hawking", "Christopher Reeves", "Helen Keller", or "Rick Hansen" comes to mind.
This means that generating awareness, which is perhaps half the battle in ensuring equitable access to resources, requires a high level of intervention and advocacy from the rest of us.
The "rest of us", as I have discovered, usually means parents. Through my own experiences working in this sector for the past decade I have found that it mostly means "Mom". I was awestruck by the many conversations with vaious mothers of children with developmental challenges that took place on the 13th. Countless epic stories filled with struggles and heartaches, and in most cases desperation is just below the surface.
On the one hand, we were happy as staff and volunteers of the Special Needs Network to see that we did the right thing in starting up this organization and moving it forward, but we were also a bit overwhelmed by the amount of work that lies ahead (but eager to tackle it nonetheless!).
More than the amount of work, the real challenge is to locate the needed resources to carry it out. With all levels of government (with few exceptions across Canada) restructing, downsizing, amalgamating, (and so on, you pick the buzzword of the week)
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