UU Materials and Downloads
WELCOMING All CHILDREN AND YOUTH/THE INVOLVE WORKSHOPS
I am no longer giving the Involve workshops. Please click here for the Involve Training Materials and Activities: A Guide for Teacher Training. Along with my book, Welcoming Children with Special Needs, A Guidebook for Faith Communities you will have all the information you need for conducting your own Involve training for teachers. The book is no longer in print, however a PDF copy of the complete book is available at the UUA website.
The Involve Project started in 1999 with a survey of Unitarian Universalist (UU) churches concerning the challenges encountered trying to minister to children with special needs labels. While still working part time for the UU Urban Ministry in Boston, I wrote seven Involve newsletters for religious educators funded by the Unitarian Sunday School Society and published on the UUA web site. This led to leaving the Urban Ministry and a grant from the UU Funding Program to write my book, Welcoming Children with Special Needs, A Guidebook for Faith Communities, which was published in 2004. The Veatch Program continued my funding to train religious educators around the country.
During the 14 years with the Involve Project, I conducted approximately 85 Involve workshops and trainings ranging from four to fifteen hours which translates into approximately 2,000 participants, given several sermons and talks, consulted with many churches, and wrote A Faith-Based Sexuality Education Guide for the Inclusion of Children and Youth with Special Needs to go with the OWL curricula. Now it is time to end in order to make way for another beginning. It feels fitting that I end where I began, writing a guide for religious educators to be used in conjunction with my book.
A team of the Equal Access Disability Group is working with the UUA to create a congregational certification program focusing on disabilities. It will be similar in nature to the Welcoming Congregation Program. In lieu of the very expensive idea of having me provide training for religious educators for all the churches choosing the process of certification, it was decided that I write a manual for religious educators incorporating my workshop material so that each Director of Religious or Life-Span Education can train their own teachers. The Involve Training Materials and Activities: A Guide for Teacher Training is available on this web site and will be part of The Disability Credentialing Handbook, Resources for Welcoming and Supporting People with Disabilities and their Families in Our Congregations and is. I am delighted to be able to end my Involve Project in a way that helps religious educators become self-sufficient. It was the original intent.
Faith-Based Sexuality Education Guide for the Inclusion of Children and Youth with Special Needs
Involve Training Materials and Activities: A Guide for Teacher Training
