The mission of  To Be Like Me is to encourage empathy, compassion, and kindness through disability awareness programs led by people living with disabilities.  To Be Like Me provides disability awareness programs focusing primarily on school-aged children and fostering empathy among them. Empathy, the awareness of others’ feelings, is a vital component of developing strong leaders and communities. Research has demonstrated that disability awareness programs help young children develop empathy and create a more positive environment for all students. It is also known that the experiences we have during this time impact our perceptions of others and our values throughout our lives. This makes it imperative that we teach children about the positive impact of inclusion and diversity.

Late childhood and early adolescence are when children begin to notice others’ differences. At this age, they are developmentally ready to form empathy for others’ life conditions.  Therefore, our disability awareness programs are geared towards children in 4th-6th grade. We provide a two-hour interactive session covering at least ten areas of disability: autism and sensory processing, mental health differences, deaf and hard of hearing, speech and communication differences, chromosome differences, mobility differences, limb differences, blind and visual impairments, learning differences and invisible/non-apparent disabilities.

During the To Be Like Me in-person program, students participate in five different “experiences” that provide them with an opportunity to directly interact with our Leaders in Education and Advocacy for Disabilities (LEADers). Each experience mimics a real-life scenario so that participants can appreciate how something that happens during the program could just as easily happen in real life. For example, one of the experiences is set in a room designed to look like a cafe. In this experience, students have the opportunity to sit down with a LEADer and get to know each other. In each experience, LEADers provide education about their disability or difference and facilitate a meaningful interaction to demonstrate the positive impact of inclusion and acceptance. The program is a platform for LEADers to share their stories, find paid employment and purpose, and advocate for themselves and others. 

To Be Like Me disability awareness programs are offered both in-person and online. We partner with Dallas ISD, Highland Park ISD, and Richardson ISD as well as other DFW schools to provide their students with disability awareness education. We successfully met and surpassed all of our 2022-2023 academic program goals by providing in-person programming to 5,900 students, teachers, and community members. We also provided virtual programming to an additional 1,500 students and teachers. Because of the increased demand for our in-person program, we expanded our programming during the 2022-2023 academic year. It was and will continue to be offered one day a week at the Tolleson Family Activity Center in Dallas and one day a week at the Network of Community Ministries in Richardson.  Our goals for the 2023-2024 academic year are to provide disability awareness programming in-person to 6,500 students, teachers, and community members and online to 1,500 students and teachers. 

To Be Like Me partners with many organizations in the community, including Big Thought, Best Buddies, the Potter’s House, Daymark Living, Chance’s Cafe and the Belong Disability Ministry of HPUMC, the City of Dallas, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Highland Park Transitional Program, Notre Dame School in Dallas and My Possibilities. In collaboration with these partners, To Be Like Me has expanded awareness of our programming, educated additional community members, recruited LEADers, and done important growth and development work with existing LEADers.  

The vision of an inclusive community based on personal interactions and relationships is what motivates the staff and volunteers at To Be Like Me. We believe that through meaningful interactions with our LEADers, we create a learning opportunity that fosters empathy and compassion and equips our communities to be more inclusive. The impact of our programming extends far beyond those who participate. There is a ripple effect when participants share what they’ve learned and model the inclusive and compassionate behaviors that they have learned from our LEADers.