C.O.P.E.S

When Zoey was first given her diagnosis, I posted a couple of things on my Facebook page regarding the fears I had and the stress I felt regarding making the "right" choices. Someone I went to high school with saw my posts and invited me to join a FB support group for special needs parents called Lilly's House (it's name has changed now due to stupid and unfortunate drama, but will always be Lilly's House in my mind). Anyhow, this support group is awesome and they do all kinds of events and get togethers in addition to the online support. Unfortunately for me, it is based in Southern California, so that makes it kind of impossible for Zoey and I to participate.

I searched Facebook and found some pages for autism families in Columbus, but nothing that even comes close to this other group. There have also been a couple of different people who posted about wanting to do play dates or get togethers but nothing ever seemed to materialize. So I decided to take things into my own hands and create my own group. I knew that I couldn't do it completely on my own, so I reached out to a mom I knew from the Columbus Autism page and asked if she would be interested in taking this journey with me. She was kind enough to agree and we met that weekend to discuss things.

Lisa and I had a mini support group with just the two of us that day at Mimi's Cafe. It was so nice to just talk to someone else, face to face, who was struggling with some of the same things I was. After our meeting, I came home and brainstormed some names. I'm not very creative when it comes to things like that. The name Lisa and I ended up settling on was C.O.P.E.S. which stands for Central Ohio Parents for Empowerment and Support (although I'm thinking of seeing if everyone is ok with changing it to Central Ohio Parents Empowering and Supporting because I just like that better. It seems more appropriate since we are about empowering and supporting each other rather than advocating for empowerment and support. If that makes sense).

C.O.P.E.S is open to parents of children with any special need. However, right now the majority of the members have children on the spectrum just because that is Lisa and my base for inviting people to the group. The goal of the group is really to foster face to face connections between the members. The online support is great, but there is really nothing that compares to that face to face. The group has been up and running since January 24th and has 63 members. Not all of the members are what I would call active. We had two events planned for February, a play date and a coffee time. The play date had to be canceled unfortunately due to a big snow storm we had. The coffee time was the next weekend and I think it was a great start. Lisa and I were a little nervous about no one showing up, but pretty soon three people were there looking for us. Then someone else came a little bit later, so there ended up being six of us hanging out and talking in Panera. It was such an encouraging start that I can't wait for our next meet up.

I hope that we can continue to grow and develop C.O.P.E.S into something really special.