What is Best Buddies?
Best Buddies is a global volunteer organization dedicated to enhancing the lives of people with intellectual disabilities by providing opportunities for one-to-one friendships. It operates as a student run club that creates buddy pairs between high school students with and without disabilities. Also, there is at least one social activity a month. Best Buddies provides socialization opportunities, thus providing the necessary tools for people with intellectual disabilities to become more independent and included in the community.
What are the different roles?
Peer Buddies: Participants make a commitment to contact each other once per week. This could be by telephone, email or face-to-face communication. They also make plans to get together twice per month outside of the school day. This could be having lunch together, catching a movie, going shopping, attending sporting events, or similar activities. Students also attend the monthly group social activities as planned.
Associate Member: There are not enough buddies for everyone to be able to be a peer buddy. Therefore, students can be on a committee. There is the lunch committee which means that they eat lunch with their assigned buddy at least twice a month. The other committee is the letter committee. This means that they write their assigned buddy a letter or note at least twice a month. On top of this, all associate members are expected to be at the monthly group social activity.
Advisor Katie Albinson albinson@arrowheadschools.org or Asst. Advisor Malissa Runge at runge@arrowheadschools.org if you would like additional info regarding the club at AHS. Be a part of the large group of Arrowhead students who have already made this commitment to “change lives one friendship at a time”!
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