// HEARTFUL HEROES //
Precious Minds BY MICHELLE VINER PHOTOGRAPHY COURTESY OF PRECIOUS MINDS CHESTNUT PARK’S
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Providing care, support, and hope to individuals with developmental disabilities. 1.
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Enjoying Precious Minds summer camp.
recious Minds was established in 1999, in the Uxbridge area, to develop community inclusion and encourage friendship for individuals with development disabilities. Sharon Simmonds saw first-hand the challenges her friend Elizabeth Graham was having in raising her son, diagnosed with autism, and set out to seek programming that could help him. Joined by Bonnie Noble, a special needs educator, and Stephanie Weddel, an early childhood educator, Precious Minds was created to develop that programming and has been bringing care, support, and hope to the area of North Durham ever since. One of their programs is Skills for Life, a weekly adult program that engages people aged 18+ in daytime opportunities that include a variety of educational, physical, recreational and creative opportunities. Throughout Covid, Skills for Life pivoted to become the Zoom Café where participants can connect online and decide the theme for the weekly event - everything from dance and music, to sports.
For younger kids, Precious Minds offers programming that includes fitness activities like swimming, to promote good health, a Lego friendship and robotics club that employs strategies of engineering and working together, and a very popular Super Strikers Bowling league that meets weekly for fun in the lanes. For Chas Harding, Executive Director of Precious Minds since 2019, after having served on the board of directors since 2012, her mandate is clear: “We work to create community and friendship and we do so by offering meaningful, creative, and fun programs.” To help them to do that, they rely on a number of volunteers who work alongside staff members to run the programs, sometimes with a one-to-one ratio of care. Sarah Hughes is one of those volunteers who has been with Precious Minds since her early years of high school. Sarah is now a fourth-year university student who is studying biology and psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton.
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