The Triad’s Ultimate Special Needs Information Guide

By Guest Blogger Aprille Donaldson

When I moved to North Carolina from Kentucky nearly six years ago, I knew one person: my mother-in-law. On a visit with my three-year-old to Bolton Park, the closest park to our tiny apartment, I saw a green, circular bumper sticker advertising Triad Moms on Main. This website became my lifeline and was a huge factor in my ability to integrate into this community as a young mom.

TMOM has generously offered me opportunities to guest-blog for them throughout the last six years, a true honor. This collaboration, combined with my increasing personal experience with disabilities as a special needs mom, has allowed me to become connected with the greater disability community in the Triad. I have been instrumental in curating special needs content for TMOM, as well run a Facebook group for special needs parents in the Triad. As this group has grown, I’ve become increasingly burdened about the lack of resources – or perhaps the lack of communication of those resources – within the community.

Thus, at the beginning of this year (2019), I created a new website and accompanying Facebook page in hopes of filling this gap. This site is called Triad NC Special Needs Support and Services.

This site is not meant in any way to be a competitor of Triad Moms on Main, rather its (totally unofficial) “little sister” of sorts. I have been especially impressed with TMOMs new(er) design that took place within the last few years that has content arranged by area, stage, etc. I’ve used this as a guide to follow for my own website.

Triad NC Special Needs Support and Services is marketed as “Triad’s Ultimate Special Needs Information Guide,” but with a whopping four blog posts to date, it’s hardly that right now. My goal is to grow this site to become to the local disability community what TMOM is to local moms. But I can’t do it alone.

If you are involved in the disability community here in the Triad – be it as a special needs parent, a therapist, a special needs educator, or a volunteer – please consider being involved in this new endeavor in one (or more) of the following ways:

• Check out https://triadncspecialneeds.services/ and subscribe to receive posts by email, by entering your email in the right-hand sidebar. When new posts are published, share them on social media.
• Follow Triad NC Special Needs Support & Services on Facebook, and invite your friends to like it as well.
• Join the Triad NC Special Needs Parents Support private Facebook group.
• Check out our “events” section, both on the sidebar on the website and on Facebook. Facebook allows page owners to add existing events to their page’s events, even if they are not involved in hosting those events. By doing this, I’ve been able to curate an events calendar that is already FULL of disability and special-needs friendly events for the Triad, and it is updated regularly.
• If you have an existing event you think our community should know about, send me a Facebook message or an email!
• If you are a provider of a disability service, treatment center, or other resource – reach out to me by filling out a simple contact form. This form will allow me to begin a feature post for your service. (I will coordinate with you via email for additional information.)
• If you are special needs parent who utilizes a service or resource, consider sharing this contact form with the staff.
• If you are special needs parent who utilizes a service or resource, consider working with me to write a review/feature post about it, from a parent’s perspective!
• If you have any more ideas of how we can grow this website, or if you are interested in doing a video interview (Facebook live), please email me at triadncspecialneeds@gmail.com.

As Christina Holder wrote recently in her guest post, One Mom’s Call for Sensitivity & Support of Special Needs, “While there are so many great organizations and therapists out there for children and adults in the Triad…there also needs to be more resources made available in small towns for people with mental illness, intellectual disabilities or spectrum disorders so we can help those in need (especially if it is not available near their home, or if they have aged out of the programs that are available).”

With your help, Triad NC Special Needs Support & Services can meet this need. Will you join me?

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Aprille Donaldson is a busy 30-something mother of two precious boys, one of whom has special needs. Aprille blogs at beautifulinhistime.com, a website that is her personal chronicle of finding God’s beauty in the messes of life. On her blog, she discusses faith, marriage, motherhood, and special needs parenting. Aprille is currently working on her associates degree, and has aspirations of pursuing a career in social work.