Blog #216: Unicorn Children’s Foundation and Neurodiverse/Disabled Families from the Caribbean
- Jeffrey Snyder
- Apr 5, 2022
- 2 min read
When I was down in Southeast Florida recently for Unicorn Children’s Foundation’s Gala, I couldn’t help but notice something about the geographical location that I think UCF is/should be taking advantage of. In Southeast Florida, there seems to be a lot of families that are originally from the Caribbean and Central America that come to states like Florida for a better life.
This is especially true as I couldn’t help but notice that there were a lot of families and individuals from Colombia during my visit. It got me thinking to the point where what if neurodiverse families from other geographical countries are coming to Florida because they don’t have the proper services in their home countries?
…
My evidence was further backed up when I was heading home on my birthday. When I was walking through FLL, I saw that JetBlue and Spirit (not my favorite airlines, especially after what happened last week to one of my friends/colleagues) had hubs at FLL with most flight heading to the Caribbean and Central America. All these countries don’t have the proper services and low cost carriers are trying to reach out to these families to bring them to the United States.
Now, that isn’t to say that this isn’t a bad thing. I may not be a fan of low cost airlines like Spirit, but I do commend them for trying to reach out to neurodiverse/disabled families in the Caribbean and Central America by having a hub in the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area.
…
Now, as for Unicorn Children’s Foundation, I’ve been very fortunate to work for an organization that is rapidly growing in terms of going international. If at some point, they could expand their teaching services to include a variety of foreign languages outside of Spanish and Portuguese as a majority of these families sometimes do not speak English.
Yes, Spanish is the more common language, but what if they get a family or individual from say, Europe and they speak an Eastern or Western European dialect like German or Italian? When I was in high school, the only languages that were offered to us were Spanish, French and Portuguese. It wasn’t enough either because those languages were the more common languages or the budget simply wasn’t there for those languages.
…
As Unicorn Children’s Foundation and many other organizations like it grows and develops, I would personally like to see as a member of the core team, the inclusion of classes teaching various languages especially now as we enter a hybrid approach of both in-person and remote services.
And it’s not just Unicorn Children’s Foundation, but all other neurodiverse/disabled organizations in states that have a high demographic population of people from other countries such as the Caribbean and Central America. I believe that we can take the next step in being inclusive and understanding if we can speak the language of the family that comes to us for support.
That, of course, means we have to learn the language that the family speaks ourselves to the best of our ability.
…
Catch you all later!!
Comments