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Opportunity Center emphasizes need for music and the arts for everyone

Messenger-Inquirer - 5/9/2022

May 9—The Opportunity Center works to provide clients with a chance to express themselves through art and music.

The center is a day-training program that provides assistance to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities to help them live in the community as independently as possible.

As the center works to set up a plan of care with clients and help them reach personal goals, according to Executive Director Sally Phillips, it also provides opportunities for clients to gain meaningful experiences, some of which are set in art and music.

Arts and music, she said, are important to everyone and touches the lives of all people, even more so so for those with intellectual or developmental disabilities, as it is a means for expression, which is especially important for those who may be deaf or nonverbal.

"If you have somebody that does not communicate verbally, they might be able to communicate a lot by drawing or painting, so that would give them an avenue to express feeling, to express themselves and who they are," she said. "We just want to give them experiences so that when you ask somebody what they want to do in the next two years, five years or 10 years, that they have something to draw from."

The center, she said, has several clients who are artistically inclined and one who plays guitar on a regular basis. Artwork from its clients is displayed throughout the center.

Phillips said the center recently worked with clients to create self-portraits, which provided insight as to how many clients view themselves.

"Sometimes, those things are very eye-opening in how they view themselves in that self-portrait." she said.

The center, she said, provides opportunities regularly for clients to indulge in art projects. It welcomes local musicians to show off their talents and show clients a new skill, which not only provides them a chance to engage in new hobbies, but also to interact with the community.

She said a steel drum band came to the center from Owensboro High School to play for clients and give them a chance at the drums.

"We have an individual who is deaf, and I was interested to see if he would just watch them, but he went up close to them, and when I talked to him, he said he could feel the music," she said. "When they had some of the clients come up and play the steel drums, he wanted to do that, even though he couldn't hear them, he wanted to be close and to feel that vibration."

It is important, Phillips said, to provide the same opportunities for self-expression and participation in the arts for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities as anyone else.

Although, historically, participation for those individuals in the arts has not been readily accessible, she said, that has started to change.

"Media kind of opens those doors a little bit more than it used to," she said. "I think the younger children that are mainstreamed into the school system probably will have a bigger chance than a lot of our clients that are an older generation ... to have those experiences, so we kind of have to make up for that for them."

Not only has the center worked to provide more artistic opportunities for clients, Phillips said, but it has worked to open many other doors, including volunteerism where clients are going out into the community on a regular basis to do community service projects.

Some of those projects, she said, have been working with the senior center and the Botanical Garden.

The center, she said, encourages community members who have talents they would like to share, or volunteer projects, to reach out and share with clients.

"A lot of our clients have never had that before, so the more we can open them up to people in the community, the better that it is for them," she said. "Everybody wants to have a purpose; everybody wants to have a talent. We strive to give people a part of that that maybe they couldn't get before."

Christie Netherton, cnetherton@messenger-inquirer.com, 270-691-7360

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