IU welcomes Best Buddies

The annual Best Buddies national leadership conference began Friday at IU and wrapped up Sunday with final speeches by several participants with intellectual disabilities.

Best Buddies is a nonprofit organization that matches volunteers with people who have intellectual and developmental disabilities and, since its founding in 1989, has expanded internationally.

The conference, which has taken place at IU for the past seven years, included university chapter board members from across the country as well as about 50 participants with disabilities. The volunteers attended seminars about how to improve their local chapters.

The intellectually disabled participants worked on individual speeches throughout the three-day conference, each practicing in front of a full classroom of their peers. Two finalists were selected to speak at the final Best Buddies event Sunday night in Alumni Hall.

This year’s conference saw for the first time a Best Buddies alumna returning as a staff member. Rachel Lipke, who has a intellectual disability and first became friends with her Best Buddy seven years ago in Massachusetts, was a group leader during this year’s conference training sessions.

“Everyone here is so full of life, full of energy, and laughs all the time,” Lipke said. “We’re really learning it’s OK to be different and to have a disability.”

Lipke is a member of the BUILD committee: Buddies United in Leadership Development. She helps participants prepare speeches about their background, hobbies and life goals. She said other activities included sharing photographs with the audience and creating short skits about shopping, eating at a restaurant and calling friends to make plans.

“It is an incredible, a phenomonal, group,” Lipke said. “I’m so proud of the progress they’ve all made.”

Kali Wasenko, the deputy director of programs for BUILD, led public speaking practice sessions Sunday for Best Buddies participants. She became involved with Best Buddies six years ago as a freshman at the University of Michigan. She said she believes the positive social interaction Best Buddies offers can transform lives.

“I’ve witnessed what an incredible change the program makes in their lives,” she said. “All of my fellow employees see the impact it makes.”

Wasenko, whose brother Ryan has Down Syndrome, said she grew up with an intimate understanding of the challenges faced by people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“I know people who were born and doctors said they would never be able to walk and never able to learn,” she said. “And now they’ve proven the doctors wrong. They have jobs, they’re involved in the community, they have a voice, they have friends.”

Wasenko said after her first year of being a Best Buddy, she decided to dedicate her life to the mission of the organization. By her senior year, she was the director of University of Michigan’s Best Buddies chapter, and now she works at Best Buddies International in Miami.

Best Buddies founder and chairman Anthony K. Shriver attended the IU conference and said people living with disabilities have made enormous progress in the 20 years since Best Buddies began.

“Young people around the ages of 17 and 18 have much more confidence and self-esteem,” Shriver said. “The community at-large is also much more accepting in general.”

He said he remembered a time when mental disability was more stigmatized, and people with mental disabilities were destined to live isolated in institutions. Citing the infamous Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, which gained national attention after revelations of abuse and unethical living conditions surfaced in the early 1970s, Shriver said people with disabilities born today have more opportunities to live happily and successfully.

“White collar jobs for the mentally disabled simply didn’t exist 20 years ago,” he said. “Now people with disabilities can learn many types of jobs, even at the white collar level, not just fast-food jobs.”

Shriver’s mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founded the Special Olympics in 1968 to provide athletic competition for intellectually and developmentally disabled adults and children. Anthony Shriver started Best Buddies in 1987 while he was an undergraduate student at Georgetown University, and in 1989 Best Buddies was incorporated as a nonprofit organization and expanded to 33 colleges.

Today, Best Buddies has chapters in all 50 states and includes more than 1,000 middle schools, high schools and colleges in the United States and abroad, according to its Web site, www.bestbuddies.org.

“Students should consider joining our program because of the impact it has not only on your Buddy, but yourself as well,” Christine Ma, programs assistant for Best
Buddies International, wrote in an e-mail. “You become part of a large global movement that encourages individuals to see the abilities in everyone, and not the disabilities.”

Anyone interested in becoming a Best Buddy volunteer should visit the Best Buddies booth at the Student Activities Fair during Welcome Week.