Happy holidays?

For most of us, the busy holiday season means time to entertain, party and enjoy some down time with friends and family. But for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, it can be an intensely lonely time of the year when the social isolation they already experience only gets worse. Imagine if the only people you saw from now until the New Year were those paid to support you? 

Friendships – all year round, not just in the holidays - as Open Future contributor and self-advocate Steve Dymond says, are crucial:

“It’s important for me to have friends because without friends you haven’t got anyone else you can rely on. It’s a good feeling to know you have some people there if you need them and vice versa. It’s all about sharing experiences and sharing different things between each other.”

Open Future Learning strongly believes that the support staff person's most important role is to help people to develop and maintain friendships. Community and friendships help us to live longer and happier lives, yet a recent review of research showed that 50% of people we support experience chronic loneliness.

As Open Future contributor David Pitonyak says in this film: "Nothing is more important than building meaningful and enduring relationships."

Helping people to connect with others in their communities can seem like a daunting task. Open Future contributor Margaret Cushen says a community mapping exercise is one way to start building connections, just by writing down or photographing local places and activities that are – or could be – important to someone

Leading thinker Beth Mount adds: "We have to know people’s communities inside and out. We go into community as an explorer. What are the assets of this place, what do people need done here, what do people need help with, where are the opportunities to contribute? Talk to people, go explore! Find out what is here in this place and how that might be a world that someone with a disability can bring and offer something."

It is worth bearing in mind the basic tasks of good support as developed by John O'Brien which are as pertinent now as they were almost 40 years ago when they were first developed. To help people become full citizens, John said, the first step is to discover their gifts and interests, and then to create opportunities in community where people can share those gifts.

One story David Pitonyak tells is about once working with a young man called Roland. Roland was very aggressive, but he and David made a connection. Returning to his shift one evening in Vermont, he noticed Roland had left the home without anyone noticing. David traced some footsteps through the snow for about a mile and eventually found Roland. David recalls:

"I realized, standing in the snow, that an essential place of Roland's suffering is that he didn't have anybody in his life. We knew he experienced autism; we knew he was aggressive. But nobody had ever noticed that he had no people that he wanted to be with."

David shares that he used his close and trusted relationship with Roland to help him to explore and experience things he had never tried before. David explains that it wasn't long before Roland was making expansive lists detailing all the things he wanted to do and all the people he wanted to see in a day.

As David says, relationships are critical to our wellbeing. Having something to look forward to helps us cope better with our daily lives. "A lot of people who experience disability don’t have that much to look forward to…I really believe we should help people find more joy in their lives."

And what better time to find that joy than this holiday season.

Learn more about the module 'Building Friendships and Community' and all of the Open Future Learning modules here.

Please email [email protected] to schedule a free demo or feel free to reach out to me directly if you have any questions.

Thank you

Ben Drew