Clay – Thrive Adult Day Program:
When I think back to this past year and reflect on the pandemic, there were many challenges as it came as a surprise to everyone – we never saw it coming! However, the Thrive team quickly realized it wasn’t time to slow down and our community needed us more than ever. Right away, we all were thinking of innovative ways to still connect with our participants to deliver fun programming with the new barriers and restrictions. It was so important for us to make sure everyone was connecting and had access to what they needed in order to make our virtual programs successful. Thankfully we were able to drop off supplies and materials to everyone to ensure they had everything they needed in order to fully participate. Our programs since COVID started have reduced social isolation and helped some participants with increased levels of independence.
Our programs give Thrive participants a purpose, something to do and look forward to.
When the weather started getting warmer, we introduced parking lot programs where we would socially distance using the parking spaces and do programming from a distance. It was nice to see the participants in person and interact with them while physical distancing. It's been awesome to see how successful our programs have been and how much of a positive impact it's had on everyone involved!
As for myself, I really enjoy program planning and implementation with my team members. The Thrive team is amazing, and we all work well together. Dance Fit was one of my favourite classes to participate in with the Thrive participants prior to COVID so instructing it in the parking lot sort of happened naturally.
I just absolutely love teaching the class and realized if they see you as a staff member, just having a great time and engaging then they will follow along because they look up to you. It’s great to see them laughing and smiling without even realizing their exercising! I remind them that everyone’s dance moves may not look exactly like what I'm doing, and that’s okay as long as they’re moving and having fun. I like to encourage them to find their own way of doing things as we are all unique.
For more on Thrive please visit https://abilitiescentre.org/programs/thrive