Bring Respite Care to Your Campus
The Campus to Community Program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to learn about people with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their families by providing respite care to a local family.
The program can be incorporated into your institution as a service-learning course, a component of an established course, an internship experience, or student club activity. Respite care can be provided individually in the home setting or as a group in a community or campus setting. You may run the program independently through your university or collaborate with existing programs in your area.
The program offers a rich educational experience for the students, but also contributes meaningful respite care to local families who may not otherwise be receiving this type of support.
Service-Learning Course
In this service-learning course, students receive academic credit for time spent providing respite care, completing assigned readings and assignments, and meeting live with the instructor and peers on a weekly basis.
Other Program Options
Although we feel the service-learning course maximally benefits students and families, you may want to consider starting slow with an add-on to an established course or internship experience. Participation with a partner (or a group of students) is possible across all formats, but more likely when providing in-home respite through a course. We offer these formats as templates for you to flexibly incorporate respite care into your university programming. See the Program Comparison Table for more information.
Component of an Established Course
There may be a variety of courses that already exist on campus - in education, psychology, or disability studies for example - that could be enriched by an experiential component. If your course content already provides students with sufficient background for this experience, limited additional training may be necessary.
Student Club Activity
This option does not provide students with academic credit for their time, but can have similar positive impacts on student understanding of disability and family well-being. Students in clubs such as Special Olympics, Best Buddies, or other autism or disability-related clubs may be particularly keen to offer drop-in respite care activities on campus or in the community.
Internship
If there are constraints on faculty time, offering the program as an internship may be a more realistic approach to getting students this valuable hands-on experience and expanding respite care in your community.