CJ Day – Staff Writer
College life can be alienating. Without a good way to find friends, students might spend all their time staring at the walls of their room. For people with disabilities, this problem may be magnified. The Best Buddies at the University of Wyoming tries to alleviate this problem, one outing at a time.
Social groups for those with disabilities often disappear after high school, says Best Buddies president and founder, Brayden Gaston. Gaston founded the group in an attempt to connect people with disabilities with students who share the same interests.
“I like to call it, in a lot of ways, a friendship club,” said Gaston. “Oftentimes, we see that people with intellectual disabilities tend to fall off of a social cliff after high school. We try to step in and provide a means for that friendship to happen.”
Gaston matches students without disabilities up with people with disabilities on the basis of their likes and hobbies and tries to plan activities that both will enjoy. For example, a student and a person with disabilities who both enjoy action movies might go see the newest superhero movie together.
“I try to step in very minimally, and these friendships tend to turn into a regular thing. You don’t set an alarm reminding you to get into contact with your friends, over time it just becomes a natural thing, and that’s what we see with the people who participate.” said Gaston.
Best Buddies is a relatively new student organization. Gaston founded the group in the spring of 2018 as a freshman, when he saw a need for disability advocacy in the Laramie community. The RSO grew quickly over the next few semesters, as Gaston found like-minded people to help him and groups willing to supervise activities.
The group partnered with the Transition Academy through the Albany County School District and Project Search through Ivinson Memorial Hospital. Both organizations work on teaching adults with intellectual disabilities life skills and employment skills. Until Best Buddies, the organizations struggled to connect with students.
“When we started, that first year was pretty slow,” said Gaston. “Just planning it all and finding people willing to help out took up a lot of my time and energy.”
This semester, Best Buddies faces a unique and welcome problem – they have more students wanting to help out than they have people with disabilities.
“It’s a good problem to have, but it means that we have to get kind of creative with our buddy pairing. We have a surplus of college students who are ready and excited to meet people,” said Gaston. “A lot of times, our only problem with outreach is that people don’t know about the club. When people hear about our club, they’re usually willing to help, they just don’t know that we exist.”
Even though the group has all the peer friends that it needs right now, there are still plenty of ways that students can get involved with the group. In particular, Gaston said that they could use some help with fundraising and outreach.
