Volunteer Advocacy Project

TN-Vanderbilt University, UCEDD/LEND
Program Type	UCEDD	Fiscal Year	2020
Contact	Robert Hodapp, Ph.D.
Email	[email protected]
Phone	615-322-8946
Project Description
Realizing the challenges parents face in advocating for their children with disabilities, The Volunteer Advocacy Project (VAP) trains interested individuals to become special education advocates so they can provide instrumental and affective support to families of children with disabilities. Since its inception in fall of 2008, The VAP has trained over 250 advocates across the state. The VAP is comprised of three parts: (1) a 40-hour training, (2) the shadowing of a special education advocate, and (3) the linkage of the volunteer advocate with four families of children with disabilities. The VAP-T intervention is a part of a larger, 3-year R34 grant to assess the provision of a 12-week workshop to help parents of students with ASD to assess adult services such as SSI, SSDI, housing, employment, medical-health, and post-secondary education. We will give the intervention to 40-50 families in two different VAP-T workshop series to determine whether, as a result of this training, parents can learn about and become more effective advocates for their young adults with ASD, in terms of various types of residential, vocational, health, and other services. In the project's work so far, our research team has developed and revised the workshop curriculum for the 12-week (2-1/2 hours per session) VAP-T sessions; recruited and run the VAP-T sessions this past spring; and is recruiting participating families in the three sites (Nashville, Memphis, Chattanooga), along with working with psychologists to ensure that each of the youth has confirmed ASD diagnoses. Over the coming year we will adapt the revised VAP-T curriculum for publication-dissemination, and the entire research team will begin the more formal implementation, data collection, and preliminary analyses of this "waiting list control" intervention study.