Our Future is in Good Hands!

Mentoring young people has always been something that has given me great pleasure, and added a lot of value and meaning to my life. This past year I had the opportunity to serve as the Project Advisor for an incredibly gifted young woman's Girl Scout Gold Award. I first met Jordan Moore, who recently graduated from high school, four years ago when we were paired up for a Girl Scout job-shadowing event. Jordan fell in love with KIT and we fell in love with Jordan. Subsequently, Jordan interned at KIT for a summer, served as a featured speaker at our National Conference on Inclusion and became one of the founding members of the I Am Norm campaign. Jordan, who lives with a disability, is a passionate advocate for inclusion.

The Girl Scout Gold Award is the highest achievement in Girl Scouts, and requires significant, individual effort on behalf of the candidate. Jordan's project, Inclusion Made Easy: How to Bring Everyone to the Table, focused on inclusion of high school students in and out of classroom environments. She identified and organized a group of teens, living with and without disabilities, and created a National Youth Council on Inclusion. They created a resource guide and website to encourage inclusive environments in high school clubs and extracurricular activities. They sent the guide to 38 schools, potentially reaching more than 67,000 students.

I am incredibly proud of Jordan and so honored to have had the chance to work with her in her high school years. She's headed off to Yale in the fall and has an incredibly bright future ahead of her. It really does my heart good to see young inclusion advocates like Jordan. This mission will take some years to fully realize, so it's important to have dedicated people following behind us and coming up the ranks. Love you, Jordan!

This year I will be supporting another young inclusion dynamo, Malia Rappaport, as she uses her Gold Award project to promote inclusion.