Best Buddies Halloween Meet and Greet Group!

By: Megan Steciv

Best Buddies Canada UTSG is a non-profit organization dedicated to building friendships between students and those in the community with intellectual disabilities. Our events promote acceptance and inclusion of those with intellectual disabilities. The peer buddies and buddies have the opportunity to engage in a variety of social activities, from watching a movie to crafting to carving a pumpkin together.

Best Buddies is all about strengthening the bonds of friendship! These events provide the buddies with the opportunity to engage in new social interactions with a diverse group of people. Many students, or peer buddies, come from various cities across Canada and countries across the world. We have had peer buddies from Egypt, China, and Japan!

We also organize events within the city of Toronto. We have previously gone as a group to see the movie Home Alone and have also gone bowling. We went on a special trip last year to the Ontario Science Centre. The buddies always express their enthusiasm and   enjoyment at the events, which provide the opportunity to be active participants in their community. Inclusiveness, acceptance, and engagement are the goals of all our events and fundraisers!

This year at our Halloween Meet and Greet, we designed several new activities, including a candy scavenger hunt and pumpkin carving. The buddies  enjoyed pizza and their own roasted pumpkin seeds.

Many buddies demonstrated their excellent pumpkin carving skills and monster mash moves during the ‘spooktacular’ freeze dance!

We are always striving to build a larger and stronger chapter so that we can provide to those with intellectual disabilities the opportunity to experience a variety of friendships. Our chapter currently consists of almost seventy persons as we continue to move onward and          upward. Best Buddies is an extremely rewarding experience for both buddies and peer buddies. We are a dynamic community of committed members, many of whom have been with Best Buddies for over three years. We even have members who have been involved for ten or more years! Best Buddies is more than a club or a chapter, it is a caring community of dedicated members who share similar interests and goals.

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