Sunshine Squad Support
At The Sunshine Stop, we believe in helping our Sunshine Squad and providing a safe environment and a purposeful experience. We want our crew to understand that they can learn new things and that they will find what works best for them in employment situations. And that failure and trying different approaches may be part of the process. We won’t wrap our Squad in bubble wrap and protect them from all risk—we’ll be there supporting them as appropriately as they need while giving them their dignity to try and learn and be empowered. If you visit The Sunshine Stop and see a Squad member learning something new, appreciate the risk they are taking by working on their job skills publicly as they serve you. Every shift, every role, every sale—the Squad brings their best work and shares their skills with dignity and pride!
Ask anyone in the disability world what it means to treat someone who lives with a disability with dignity and respect, and you will likely hear what NOT to do. That’s because dignity is fundamentally about treating someone as a human of value, whose worth is acknowledged and welcomed regardless of any intellectual or physical differences. And sometimes our world doesn’t know how to do, act, speak and behave with our disability community in ways that provide dignity. Dignity is important when working with our Sunshine Squad and fundamental to how we approach all our employment support.
But there’s more to dignity than just treating someone with a disability as human and worthy. There’s also taking the time, empathy and encouragement to provide a person with the inalienable human right to take a risk and possibly fail. Very often, dignity stops short when something scary, hard, or bad could happen to a person with a disability, resulting in a case where overprotection occurs. ‘You can’t try that, what if you don’t succeed?’ seems like something more acceptable to say to someone who may be already in a care situation where extra help is provided (such as a Personal Care Assistant or Paraprofessional). But why would we tell someone with a disability not to try something just because it’s hard or new? Because they might fail? If they fail, what does that mean? What, really, is the consequence? Don’t we all—regardless of ability or disability—learn from failure? If otherwise physically safe and supervised, can’t we learn news things in the most dignified and risk-acceptable way?