Wednesday is the big day!

Social Role Valorization (SRV) education challenged me to do one thing, to make a difference in the life of one person. So, after hearing David Pitonyak, a project was born. I committed to organize volunteers to assist indivduals receving human service supports to tell their own story.

After three months of planning, we are FINALLY ready to get started! (Patience is not one of my strenghts.) The first group of volunteers, for my scrapbooking project, completed their required training last week.

Wednesday is the big day! The volunteers and the individuals they will be assisting to create scrapbooks will meet each other. In this first meeting, the individuals will get to choose a scrapbook, receive a picture of his/her volunteer, talk a little and pick out some colors for the scrapbook.

The primary goal of the project is to create a scrapbook to assist an individual to tell his/her own story. Additionally, we will provide some education on scrapbooking as a hobby, and so maybe some of the individuals will develop the role of “scrapbooker”. Developing this role could create social opportunities for unpaid relationships or even employment opportunities for individuals receiving human service supports.

We will create two distinctly different types of scrapbooks depending on whether or not an individual has pictures and memorabilia from his/her past. For an individual who has pictures from his/her past, we will create a traditional scrapbook. The second type of scrapbook will be for an individual who doesn’t have pictures from his/her past, and will be a little more challenging. Both types of scrapbooks will have a lot of journaling about the individual on every page.

Our challenge for the second type of scrapbook will be to create the “feeling” of the story the individual wants to tell. We will take or gather current pictures and then write the story. There is no scrapbooking “rule” that says a picture has to match the journaling, and not all pictures in the scrapbook have to be of people. Some of the pictures could be pictures of favorite things, places, foods or activities that an individual already does or would like to learn to do.

So what's the status of my challenge? So far, I have convinced/coerced one of my closest friends and two family members to help three of the most vulnerable members of our society to tell their own story. What can you do to impact the life of one individual that is not part of your life today? Are you willing to accept the challenge?