STUDENT SPOTLIGHT: President of Best Buddies chapter spreads message of inclusion
For Olivia Glynn, becoming a special education teacher is the only career she has ever wanted to pursue.
The third-year liberal studies major reasons that much of her enthusiasm for becoming an educator began while growing up shadowing her parents at the schools they worked at in New Jersey. Glynn’s father worked as a K-8 art teacher, and her mother worked as a school social worker.
“I would sit in and eavesdrop on some of my mom’s meetings and I’d go into the special education classrooms at her school,” Glynn said. “They also started letting me run little lessons and things like that and that’s just where I knew, ‘Okay, this is what I want to do forever.’”
Working with individuals with disabilities is, in Glynn’s words, half skill and half passion — and she feels it is something she was born to do.
“I always say that you have to have that passion and have that innate ability to do it,” Glynn said. “I just kind of naturally found my way here.”
Glynn exerts her passion through Best Buddies — the largest global organization dedicated to ending the social, physical and economic isolation of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD).
“The whole point of Best Buddies is for it to be like a genuine connection and just spread the message of inclusion and everyone deserves a friend,” Glynn said. “You can have as deep of a friendship with someone with (IDD), as you do without. They are just people. They’re the same as everybody else, just a little bit different.”
Glynn remembers discovering Best Buddies through their table during SDSU’s RSO Expo. After finding out their mission statement and attending their first meeting, she knew joining was right up her alley.
“I called my mom after and I was like, ‘I want to be president of this by the time I graduate,’” Glynn said.
Three years later, just before graduating, Glynn is now president of Best Buddies SDSU. As the organization’s new leader, one of her greatest missions is to spread the word about why people should get involved in the IDD community.
“I think a lot of reasons that people don’t get involved with people with disabilities is out of a lack of education and a lack of comfort,” Glynn said. “They see these people as different and almost like scary, and they don’t know how to communicate with them. So our goal is to show that these are just regular, awesome people that are capable of everything that me and you were capable of.”
SDSU’s chapter of Best Buddies is focused on the friendship pillar — this means they are focused on building friendships between people with and without IDD, offering social mentoring while improving the quality of life and level of inclusion. Through its matching program, the organization goes beyond just a mentorship program to build genuine one-to-one friendships between individuals with disabilities and SDSU students without disabilities.
When Glynn was a freshman and sophomore, her buddy was named Olivia as well — their closer friendship being dubbed the “Olivia Duo” or “Olivia Squared.”
Although not officially paired this year, the two still get Panera all the time and go shopping often at the mall, Target or Bath and Body Works.
“We’ve started to branch into each other’s lives more and more,” Glynn said.
Currently, Glynn is working on plans to collaborate with other organizations and create events everyone would want to attend, such as watching a hockey game.
“Involvement is really just so impactful,” Glynn said. “It makes such a bigger difference. By attending one meeting, you've helped to spread that mission just a little bit farther, and you open up so many more opportunities than you even realize.”
At the end of the day, Glynn notes that in life, being a kind person should come first.
“One of my favorite stories from Best Buddies is when we were leaving one of the meetings, we walked all of our members over to get picked up by their parents by the Eureka circle,” Glynn said. “It was one kid's first meeting and he started crying on the way to his car and I thought something was wrong. So I was like, ‘Hey, what's wrong? Talk to me.’ And he was just so excited. He was like, ‘I'm so happy that I have friends like you guys. I've never had anything like this before.’
"He was literally brought to tears by how excited he was to have experienced that.”
Best Buddies meets every Wednesday from 5-6 p.m. in the Park Boulevard Suite. For information about their events, their Instagram page @sdsu_bestbuddies is available to contact.
