Transcript - slide 5

"Social skills, building friendships, and becoming comfortable in the community can only be done in the community. It simply does not work any other way."

Interviewer: Suzie, I would really like to be clear here that you are not talking about teaching social skills training within your facility, am I correct?

Suzanne: Totally correct, I can tell you the reason you are correct. We do not have a facility. We do not have a building anymore. We have a station where people come and go, but we do not have a building. What we found moreover is that people learn skills in the community in groups where they can actually participate. As I said a minute ago, none of our groups are more than one to three. What we really attempt to do is to have that person have the ability to interact with a sales person if they are in a store. Interact with a waitress if they are at a restaurant, or buy their own ticket at a movie theater if we go to a movie theater. When we are volunteering in the community, let’s just say with meals on wheels, we go with other people. We do not stay segregated by ourselves. The only way that you and I learned social skills was to interact with each other and the world around us. The only way a person with a disability can interact and learn how to deal with the world is to interact with people around them.

One of the parent’s major fears is that as their son or daughter goes into the community they are going to be made fun of, stared at, and looked at. In a group of one to ten [large group] , in some cases that is true, because you look and you see this group of different people. And you stay away. In a group of one to three [small group], we are not even noticed in the community. We are not even different. We, in fact, are part of the rest of the flow of the community, if you will. In fact, the waitress does look and ask the person that we are serving what they want. They do in fact interact directly with the person, and not with the staff member. We try to keep that staff member invisible, but you can’t learn social skills in an artificial atmosphere. You just can’t do it. Social skills, building friendships, and becoming comfortable in the community can only be done in the community. It simply does not work any other way.