Origin Story
The origin story of the Center for Supported Learning starts from a conversation with friends about what my then 17 year old son was going to do after graduating from high school. I deferred the question, saying that we hadn’t decided yet. But inside I was shaking at the realization that at some point an answer was needed and that I apparently was expected to know what it was.
That expectation wasn’t unreasonable I guess, given that I had been his primary caretaker since birth. I’d fought with doctors, hospitals, therapists, educators, insurance companies, myself and sometime him, many times over the years to keep him alive and get him what he needed. I’d powered my way through raising two other children, keeping a reasonably clean house, and staying married to my husband of 25 years, all in a city thousands of miles away from our family and friends.
I didn’t do it alone of course, I’d made friends, accomplices and frenemies that helped me navigate the various service delivery systems that we have encountered along the way. But high school graduation left me with a sinking feeling in my stomach – like when you are at a cliffs edge looking down into a deep chasm. Why?
Because after high school, the child is cooked – a fully formed adult now, ready to venture into the world on their own. High school graduates go off onto new pathways, to college, to work or to adventures on their own, finding their way. But mine wasn’t going to do that – wasn’t ready to do that and might never be.
What was he going to do after high school? I had already heard a little bit about rehabilitation services, and work training programs, both of which provided some opportunities to be involved in the community but both were limited in time and scope. How would he spend the remaining time during the day?
Without college or work, how would he make friends? How would he engage with the world? If we lived in a bigger place, less isolated, less rural (and we are in the 2nd largest city!) there might be more options. But in the here and now, the opportunities seemed slim.
That was no more acceptable to me than any of the other challenges I’d met while growing him up. I contacted a few other friends and floated the idea of starting a non-profit with the mission of creating sustainable inclusive activities for my son and his friends to do once they graduated from high school. I knew from years of wrestling with my son, the best way to get him to do something is to give him a choice and to build that choice around something he is interested in.
From this, interest and choice become two of the primary ideas that we structured our non-profit around. Our mission is to build connections with community partners based on the interests people at CSL express. We then work to make those connections long-term so that my son and his friends have the opportunity to engage in meaningful life-long learning activities in the community.
Our first project was the Lettuce Grow Urban Gardening program in collaboration with the River Valley Child Development Services, the Sustainable Department at Marshall University and the Extension Services at West Virginia State University. We then expanded to collaborate with Family Nutrition and Extension Services at West Virginia University, Nourishing Networks at the Food Justice Lab at West Virginia University and Huntington’s Kitchen to learn how to grow, cook and eat heathy foods.
In our second year, we expanded into the fine arts by learning how to throw pots with the resident Ceramic Artist at the Huntington Museum of Art. In our third year, we hope to expand into the performing arts by developing collaborations with local dance, music and theater organizations. We’ve also started a getting moving initiative with our collaboration with Ainsley’s Angels, an inclusive running organization that we have brought to the state of West Virginia.
Our mission is not limited to just “doing”, we are also “thinking” about what it means to be disabled, to live meaningfully in a community, and how to fight to have our voices heard. Our research efforts in the coming years will focus on these and other issues important to our community and we will work on increase opportunities to share what we are doing and thinking with a wider audience in the state and the country.