NICHCY: National Dissemination Center for Children with Disabilitites

Imagine a place where your kid can go and learn life skills in a completely safe and friendly environment. No, it’s not Xanadu, but it might feel like that once you get there. The Weinberg Life Village in West Bloomfield, MI is a unique, interactive facility where children with special needs can have fun while they practice important life skills through role play. Role Plays include events like waiting in a doctor's office, shopping in a drug store, and doing the laundry.

Students are typically driven in from neighboring schools (within about two hours drive) and given experiences they otherwise might not get. There are over 15 different classes, split between Life Skills and Job skills. For example, classes include “A Lesson in Healthy Living,” “Job Search,” and “Making Plans and Changing Plans.” There are also small-scale shops like a Beauty Shop, a Dentist Office, and Sav-On-Drugs, where students can use scaled-down shopping carts, aisles stocked with personal care products, and check-out lanes fitted with scanners and cash registers. To take the realism further, some items on sale in the drug store can be used elsewhere in LifeTown.

“Friendship Circle is about creating friendships first,” says Batsheva Hadar, the Adult Volunteer Coordinator for the Detroit suburb organization. “The focus is on the friendship experience. We pair children with special needs with a volunteer, maybe a teenager, maybe a senior, and that is the beauty of what we do. We create a sense of belonging, build community, see things like speech therapy improve, and all with volunteers who are learning too the beauty of individuals with disabilities.” Indeed, the idea has caught on and Friendship Circle can now boast over 70 offshoots worldwide. Though mostly in the United States, there are also new groups in places like Canada, France, Israel, China and South Africa.

When the idea came up to do something on a grand scale, the founders of Friendship Circle went around to parents and professionals who worked with individuals with disabilities and asked them what they would ask for if they could have whatever they wanted. The Life Village facility is the result of that, and compliments the friendship-building and other programming efforts of Friendship Circle overall. Funding for the facility came from private donors as well as a grant from the Department of Education’s Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP). As the Friendship Circle web site states: “At LifeTown, children with special needs and their parents and siblings find a place that has been specifically designed to meet their needs.” How cool is that?

The organization is volunteer-driven, with over 800 volunteers worldwide. Children are paired with their own volunteer, and an effort is made to keep volunteers consistent. Activities range between both free play and structured play.

Begun and based in the Jewish Lubavich Outreach service network, Hadar emphasized that Friendship Circle serves all members of the community and that they “welcome any visitors who would like to see the facility and the program.” If you’d like to learn more, you can visit the web site (http://www.friendshipcircle.org). Or you can contact her directly at their West Bloomfield offices, or through her email at batsheva@friendshipcircle.org.