Category: blog

We have bookmarks to share! So excited that this is starting to come together! And ooh, some magnets for handout too! We really want to work on awareness and advertising the upcoming book!

There have been several versions of the story since it was originally created. Natalie created the original story and drew out storyboards for the sequence of pictures that would be used along with text in the book. The pictures were developed in color for a second round, then standardized and set with text for page layouts.

This is what the first three drafts looked like:

Marisa was able to take these storyboards and begin work on transforming the art for the book. She started by creating concepts of the book cover and inset for the published book.

At this point we still don’t know what publisher we’ll be working with, and have only estimated the dimensions and material for the book.

The next step was to transform Natalie’s pictures into pages, with a better idea of the number of pages that will be in the book.

Special Olympics Utah (SOUT) received a grant from the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation. The grant’s overall goal is to promote impactful advocacy by people with ID through the funding of passion projects designed and carried out by SOUT athlete leaders.

SOUT selected project pairs (an athlete leader and a mentor) from across the state of Utah to create a passion project. The training covered project management, goal setting, telling your story, and project presentation.

Michelle Wolfenbarger and Emily Rissinger are the support coordinators for the project.

Project Goal

The project targets outreach of 1,500 to 4,000 people. Using the outline below, if we just hit 35% of this it would give us a baseline of 1,500 people in outreach.

At Publication

• Engage Champion School programs in Utah
• The Utah PTA Advocacy Conference would be an ideal space for us to present. We would ask for support from SOUT and ShowUp Utah can help us get a spot in the conference
• Local bookstore events, and Public Library events
• School District invites would likely require some work, with focus on speaking to SpEd classes, assemblies, and inclusion clubs
• Work with local media (Good Day Utah, ABC4, etc) to promote a young author with a disability publishing a book on why inclusion matters, it could be significant as well.

Natalie’s first proposal for her book was made at the 2021 Aerie Real Change Makers program. As a Special Olympics Youth Ambassador and an advocate for people everywhere who live with disabilities, she wanted to write a book about inclusion and anti-bullying that could be distributed to grade schools as part of social emotional learning programs in schools.

Stories help us shape our compassion and understanding, and they open kids to conversations about empathy, dignity, purpose and character. Her story is about a girl named Amelia, who is bullied at school for having a prosthetic leg. She meets Cooper, Harper and Violet who become her best friends. Harper has an intellectual disability (like Natalie) and has been bullied too. Together they decide that they will do something to change how people are treated by working to build inclusion and respect.

It can be difficult for kids to fit in, and it’s even harder when someone has a disability. We all want a sense of belonging, we want purpose; we want to be valued and appreciated. We want to be heard, and know that our voices do matter. There is more that connects us than divides us. Inclusion means getting to do what you love.

Her message is that we’re stronger together, but only if we stand up for others until they can stand up too.