Hayden Korb is a 13-year-old who lives with autism and he will be happy to tell you that he is “limitless.” His confidence received a boost over the last year, starting with when he walked into REVEL over his summer break from school. REVEL offers a variety of programs for neurodivergent teens and young adults, engages, educates them, creates a fun community for them and, as the saying goes around the organization… allows the participants to “ace adulting.”
Hayden is on his way to doing that. “After having a summer at REVEL, Hayden’s teachers and others at his school commented on how independent he is, how much he can do on his own, how much he wants to do it on his own, how much he’s taken initiative in…. ‘I can do this,’ or ‘No, I don’t need you to do that for me. I can do it,'” said Hayden’s mother Jennifer. “His ability to know what he needs to go from class to class or, ‘it’s this class, I need to have these materials’…. all of that is a significant difference from last year.”
“I think coming into REVEL, being a 13-year-old with autism, it was a lot of new things for Hayden – a lot of new people, a lot of new faces, a lot of new expectations, which can be really hard,” said REVEL Program Manager Dakota Yett-Petty. “We definitely had a learning curve and we had some great days and we’ve had some challenging days, but we kept kind of stepping up to that challenge being, ‘what can we do for Hayden? And how can we address this? How can we prepare the staff better to handle these situations and get them ready for it?’ And it really got to a point where we noticed a big decrease in the amount of behaviors and higher need for support as the summer went on. I think because he felt comfortable. He became more familiar with the strategies and the structure. On top of that, our staff got to know him more and what worked well for him, what strategies worked well, better ways to communicate with him, better ways to help him engage in the activity. Also discovering better ways to facilitate conversation and communication between him and his peers was a big one. We just kind of kept with it through the summer.”
“The beautiful thing about REVEL is the staff just gets it,” said Jennifer Korb. “They are super skilled and they met Hayden where he was. Everybody else in the world tells you the limits… ‘here are the places where he can’t do what other 13-year-olds are doing’ and then, you come to a place like REVEL and they’re like ‘we have all these things he can do.. we just have to try it in a different way.'”
After the successful Summer program, Hayden is a “REVELER” for life. Jennifer is excited for the opportunities that await her son as he gets older, and when he is finished with school. Already, she’s hearing from Dakota and others at REVEL who recognize Hayden’s interests and skills and how they might work very well in potential jobs in the future.
“That feels amazing… I think that every parent would want that, rightT….And especially for kids that you’re not sure of what life’s going to look like,” Jennifer said. “We are living in a a time when many of us feel like our kids are not wanted. And so, for many of us, programs like this are vital to the success of our kids. We don’t have a lot of choices and we don’t have a lot of programs like this that can hold our kids well and prepare them for adulthood.”
It was a joy to get to know the Korb Family and the team at REVEL when producing a video story for the non-profit’s annual REVEL in Life Art Show. We chose to have captions put on the video story so that all at the event could follow along, especially all the REVELERS. Hayden had a fantastic time and even stood up at the podium and spoke to the couple hundred people who were in attendance.
Hayden is a happy young man, full of love, and he recognizes and cherishes that feeling of love, acceptance, appreciation and loyalty. As Hayden told me, “REVEL makes my heart happy.”
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