Title:
Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Transforming Lives Through Best Buddies

Subtitle:
Legacy, Love, Faith and Leadership | Best Buddies Month with Anthony Kennedy Shriver

Transcript:

Alycia Anderson: Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that gives disability a voice each week. We will explore topics like confidence, ambition, resilience, and finding success against all odds. We are creating a collective community that believes that all things are possible for all people. Open hearts, clear paths.

Let’s go.

Welcome to Pushing Forward with Alycia, a podcast that inspires change and gives disability a voice. And boy are we doing that today. Today’s episode honors Best Buddies Month, and we’re releasing it on March 6th.

Spread the word day, A day that brings awareness to the harmful use of the R word and champions inclusion. Today we are welcoming, literally one of the most influential voices in disability inclusion advocacy. Somebody pinch me, please, but we have. Anthony Kennedy Shriver on the show.

He is the founder. Chairman, and CEO of Best Buddies. International Best Buddies was established in 1989, and it has grown from a single chapter at Georgetown into a global movement that’s creating life-changing opportunities for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, sometimes simplified down to IDD

Best Buddies creates life changing opportunities through friendship. Love that through employment. Love that even more through leadership. Love that. And through inclusive living, Anthony. Your work is groundbreaking for our collective community, and having you here is such a powerful moment for the show, for the movement, for our pushing forward community, and honestly for me personally as a disabled advocate that has reaped the benefits of your work for so long.

So thank you so much for showing up for us, showing up for me today, showing up for your organization. It’s a thrill of my life to meet you, and I’m just not gonna fake it. It just is.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: You’re really sweet. You’re very sweet. Thank you. You’re very sweet. I’m glad to be here. It’s an honor. to you and all your wonderful work, and. by example and the challenges that you face through your life and overcoming them and having that incredibly beautiful life for yourself and being so upbeat and happy and excited, so You deserve a lot of credit for that for sure.

It’s hard to just be happy and upbeat and excited and energetic, with no physical challenges like that. But to do it and have all that it’s super impressive. Congratulations. No. Easy thing.

Alycia Anderson: Thank you so much. I appreciate you saying that. I would love, if it’s okay to take a quick moment to acknowledge the profound legacy and advocacy and social change within your family that has literally shaped our entire world. And what I wanna know in that is in growing up in an environment that has been dedicated to service, I can imagine that there’s been, that fact alone had a huge impact, not only on your life, your advocacy, but is there one family member, which I have a feeling who you might talk about, but is there one family member who inspired you to have this passion for disability inclusion specifically?

Can you talk just a little bit about that as we’re kicking this off?

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. And thank you again for all your sweet words. I feel super blessed. It’s been a huge team effort. I really consider my immediate family and my extended family as a giant team and the more successful each member of the team is, I feel like we all are more successful and the tide rises with the whole team.

And I keep trying to remind myself of that. So the more everybody else does, the more I get as a benefit and the more successful best buddies is, and I am just in my own personal life. So it’s been a great journey and I have such a wonderful blessed legacy of so many people who have done so much for over a hundred years here in the United States. So it’s been a great run sure. I really have two people that really individually I think inspire me, originally, it really has to be my mom. I think she’s been an inspiration to so many people.

Eunice Kennedy Schriver and founding the Special Olympics and so many of the things that have come as a result of her work with Special Olympics and President’s Council on intellectual development disabilities and everything, she inspired President Kennedy to do. In this field and the attention that he was able to raise to it when he was President and the attention she brought to the issue.

And all of us starting with inspiration from my aunt Rosemary Kennedy, who had profound intellectual development disabilities, my mom’s sister, president Kennedy’s sister. They’ve been huge factors for me just in general in my life. My mom was not only for her work in this space, but really most importantly for her faith, and her relentless pursuit of, the challenge that, Jesus lays out there for us as Catholics, to always be thinking of ways that we can contribute and give back. And, to whom much is given, much is expected, and to, count our blessings on a, daily basis despite all the challenges that come.

The challenges come for every family, right? Nobody gets a free pass. Nobody gets a free ride. So we’ve all got our stuff. So it’s what you do with your stuff. I always felt and she was a genius on managing and pushing through her stuff and looking at the bright side of everything and, just stay staying at it.

Let’s keep moving was her big thing. Let’s keep moving. Keep moving and keep the energy up, keep the energy high and keep pushing every day is a great message for me.

The good news is, when you keep it moving, a lot happens.That’s the, the bright side of it all. I had so many lessons from her, but she really inspired me to get into this work and she made this work, fun and exciting and energetic and creative and challenging and intellectually stimulating and entrepreneurial. Everything that’s so wonderful about being in this movement and the kinds of people that you interact with and the creativity of this population and just being a social entrepreneur. Every day is a new day. Every day is a new opportunity, and so many gifts that it’s hard once you’re exposed to this, I find to go off and do anything else.

I can’t imagine being a lawyer or an accountant or a guy on Wall Street just making tons of money, even though it’s attractive, as I. Say the devil sells a lot of really wonderful things. He’s a tough guy to compete against, but I think, the relationships and the contact you make with other human beings and, developing, lives together is really addictive and, just for me anyway, is hard to beat anywhere else. And Rosemary, she was a force of nature. She was nonverbal and. Non-ambulatory, she inspired my whole family to be in this field. And I think the thing that’s unified us more than anything really is our work with this population even more than the politics of my family.

I think the work around people with special needs is really our greatest legacy as a family. And I think, a hundred years from now that this is really gonna be the thing that people are gonna pay attention to and is gonna have the real continuation beyond, the political legacy that so many people have in the family. She was so challenged. But, I remember as a, young boy recognizing that she could swim better than anybody in my family. And it really registered for me that despite all of her disabilities, everybody would see her disabilities. She had one God-given talent that was better than anybody. She could do it better than President Kennedy or her sister my mom. So I really registered that I felt like, the rest of my life, I always tried to remind myself everybody’s got some great gift. And I think that’s really the foundation of Best Buddies. How can we meet people? How can we embrace people and support them in realizing their full potential, their dreams, whatever their dreams are, how can we support them? And if it’s employment, great. If it’s living independently, great. If it’s falling in love, great. Whatever it Is, and whatever you dream of, you wanna be a movie star.

Great. So it’s really anything, it’s as my cousin Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says so often, and even in the health space, he talks about, we all have 10,000 dreams and a sick person has one dream only. So I think that we have to remind ourselves that, I think just being healthy and just being able to get up every day and move around. You, and the challenges you have physically, have the energy and you have the, the engaging personality and the upbeat energy about life in general. That is a gift that we all have, that, we have our general health.

And I think, Rosemary was healthy overall and she brought a lot to the table. And I think, it’s a great message that if we have our health, thank God, we’re so blessed and so lucky. We can really achieve whatever our dreams are. So that’s what he tries to support those dreams.

Alycia Anderson: It’s beautiful. And boy did she bring a lot to the table. And I agree with you, your legacy. I think the disability piece, the advocacy and the opportunity that you’re bringing to our world is gonna absolutely the lasting legacy and has so much opportunity for growth, especially now, when the pathways are really opening up.

So it’s really beautiful.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: What did yesterday look like? 1980 when you’re I wanna start this movement to today where you’ve got this massive, let’s talk numbers for a minute. 3,500 chapters. 46 countries, 50 states, 1.3 million people.

Alycia Anderson: The numbers are massive. So you start this thing in Georgetown, what was the State of the Union in disability inclusion and how do you take it from that to this? Can we talk about just the inception?

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: It’s a great testament I think, in so many ways to our country. Especially as I travel. I think, so many of us talk about, the great gifts of the United States and how lucky we are and blessed we are, but to me our greatest gift is our spirit of charity, our spirit of philanthropy, our spirit of, taking ownership for our communities and investing in our communities, and people really being engaged in volunteer service. I don’t see that in any country anywhere in the world. And, we have a mighty economy and where he, we hear so much about that and we have a mighty, department. We have all these planes and bombs and all these things that we’re doing, but. If you really run around the world, the thing that I think people really respect and admire the most about the United States and is so unique to the United States is our spirit of responsibility and engagement and volunteer service and people stepping up, whether it’s in the schools now, where it’s required for people to do service. Or if it’s the incredible corporate support that organizations like us get from companies that want their employees to be engaged in socially responsibility and active in the community. To corporations and individuals wanting to hire people with special abilities to be engaged. None of that existed in the eighties at all. My mom took it a long way from the sixties to the eighties, big time. She got, some of the Special Olympics on ABC Wild World of Sports, which was one of the highest rated shows in America in those days with Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell and all those kind of legendary broadcasters were around. To get that, faces of people with special abilities in the living rooms of Americans was a great accomplishment. But to actually get ’em in the living rooms, but to get ’em in the board rooms and to get ’em in the corporate communities is where we’ve come since the eighties, and so many companies are stepping up in that arena. So many schools are stepping up and recognize that their schools are more engaging and the experience of being not only, having an education, but having that education with people with special abilities is second to none if you have them in at the seat at the table. You know when the eighties when I started there were I think three or four, schools, universities that offered programs for people with intellectual disabilities. Now there’s, I think, 158. So it, it’s grown significantly. And Clemson University has a Clemson Life program. Some of these life programs all over this country, George Mason University, there’s so many great ones. Vanderbilt, really distinguished universities welcome people with disabilities onto the campuses, and they get degrees and they go to classes. Some of ’em are living on campuses now. We’ve got our best buddies living programs across the street from some of these universities so that the kids can have the social recreational experience of being on a college campus. And when you have good social skills, good social norms, you do so much better in the workplace.

Because ultimately we wanna also get people disabilities feeling like they can contribute a hundred percent in the workforce and they can pay taxes and they can participate in 401k plans and. They can have coworkers, which they do have, and they can live independently and really ride public transportation or even some of them driving their own cars. Having really these big full lives is really realistic now and really reasonable to expect. And parents are beginning to accept it more and understand that, letting go of their child with special abilities is part of the process. Just like we all let our kids go off to college and they grow up and they move out of the house. That same experience is happening for a greater number of people with intellectual disabilities. So the movement has moved forward in such a huge way and so different when I go into a lot of these companies, whether it’s Coca-Cola, who’s a big sponsor now, or Rolex, or Jersey Mikes or Wells Fargo, some of the big blue chip companies that are out there, they wanna be involved in this.

They want their employees involved. They wanna do cause marketing with us. Did a huge campaign this past year with Jersey Mikes, and they did a specific ad, featured a bunch of people with special abilities in their ad, and it raised millions and millions of dollars for us. They put it on, Sunday night football and the World Series and Monday Night Football and Saturday game of the week for college. So recognizing that when they bring all that to their culture, their brand, that their brand actually does better, that they make more money, they’re more successful. In the communities where they operate, then if they don’t have the association with an organization like Best Buddies. It’s a great testament to, I think Americans who respect brands that align themselves with organizations like Best Buddies or Special Olympics, or, The Red Cross or St. Jude’s. There’s so many great organizations out there that, it’s a great testament to Americans. The average of America really responds favorably to a company that is committed to investing, in diversity and inclusion and acceptance. And,they’re more successful because at the end of the day, the companies are more successful and the consumer responds to the way that they position their brand, they’ll keep doing things like they’re doing with Best buddies. They’ll keep investing in organizations like ours and, they’re seeing the results of it and it’s great. And it definitely didn’t exist in the eighties and the nineties, so it. It’s really I feel like we’ve turned a corner big time in the last 10 years and even gotten way better since Covid and beyond. despite everything that’s going on now in Washington, I still think the environment’s really strong to do deals with companies and to get companies to recognize that they really get first class quality employees through Best Buddies. And it makes good business sense for them to hire.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. And I think it’s the one common ground conversation right now in the environment that we’re in. I know I see it in my own business too, where, I’m, I just booked big, huge logos, and I’m like, people’s companies still care about this. We just need to.

Advocating for it and educating, and I think the education component is huge. Can you talk about what you do at Best Buddies, for anybody that is out there that wants to get involved, understand contribute, all of that. Can you give us a little rundown of what Best Buddies is and how.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Yeah, I can. But before I do that, I might just say that, these companies that, you were talkingThere’s so many of these companies now that are embracing these causes. And as I was saying before, and I think, one of the best things that Best Buddies does is find competitive integrated jobs for people with intellectual disability.

So if someone’s listening out there and they wanna hire, or they have a company that might hire we’ve got a whole army of people with special abilities that want to be employed, that have been trained through our transition programs in schools. We have training programs, we have internship programs that prepare people with special needs so that they’re ready to go once they get out of the school system and they really make first class employees. So that’s a big thing that we, big part of what we want to do and we want to continue to grow. I think we’re the only global organization where you can one stop shop come to us, and if you’ve got a, office in San Francisco or you’ve got an office in LA or you’ve got an office in Bogota, or you’ve got an office in Manila, the Philippines, you can position and place people with special abilities in all those offices and we can manage that for you in all these multiple markets. So one of the big elements is employment because I think, having a place to go every day and feel that the confidence that comes from and the sense of purpose to, of having a job. God knows where I’d be without a job, where you’d be without a job and mean we’d be lost and our self-confidence would be in the whole. I think we need a place to go every day where we feel welcomed and accepted and that we got a seat at the table. So one of the key things we do is we find good, solid jobs for people with special abilities when they get outta the school system. And then we have programs where we train them up through the school system so that they’re job ready, so that when they’re 22 or 23 or 24, we place ’em at TJ Maxx or Jersey Mikes or Wells Fargo or Holland & Knight Law Firm that they have really successful experience there and they’re sustainable in that job. And the retention rates are super high and 90 percentile, and the unemployment rate in this country is now 82% for people with special ability. So it’s still super high, slowly but surely, we’re chipping away at it. Last year we had Jersey Mike’s commit to 3000 jobs. So that’s gonna take us seven years probably to place all those jobs. That’s a lot of jobs. But, we’ll chip away, have a plan, long-term plan, short-term plan, but we’ll hammer. So one of the things we do is jobs. The original program was our mentoring friendship program where we’re in 3,500 schools. So we have tens of thousands of kids that all get paired up with people with special abilities and socialize, feel inclusive, feel part of the community, do things on the weekends. Do things in the school day, go to lunch together, be cheerleaders, get on the football team.

We have so many great and compelling stories. So developing the social connection, getting people that are non-disabled in the school systems to understand this population exists. To be welcoming to this conversation address the whole issue of bullying, which is a lot of what spread the word does that we collaborate with Special Olympics on. Getting people to commit to not use the R word, because that still gets used if you can believe it a lot in schools. So getting people to sign the pledge, not to use the R word, hang the banner in your school. Sign the banner to commit, not to get educated about this population. So our school-based program’s big.

We have a great great leadership program, training people with special needs on how to become self-advocates and. Leaders in their own right. We have our housing program now that’s growing great. We hope to add, three or four locations a year. Now going forward we finally got that kind of thing in a position where we can scale it and connecting those housing programs, unified, collected, where people are living side by side with non-disabled people and attending universities or working at university campuses because universities are such a incredibly vibrant, exciting, dynamic place to be connected to. So to have our population connected there through employment, but also attending sporting events and cultural events and taking continuing education classes it is just really a giant home run. A big one. We launched this past year, our fifth pillar called Family Support.

We launched a department called Eunie’s Buddies in honor of my mom, which creates opportunity to create mentors for expectant mothers when they find out they have a diagnosis, that they have a baby that they become pregnant with a child, with Down syndrome. Someone to mentor them, support them on their journey to bringing that baby to term and raising that baby all the way up through the Best Buddies networks.

So that’s been, life changing, life saving, and really exciting. So what I call it now, from the womb to the tomb, being able to support people all the way through is great. So I’m really committed to Eunie’s Buddies and the family support. We’re launching a dating app now with Bumble, which is gonna be called Bumble Buddies because buddies really want to fall in love just like the rest of us.

They want have a partner in a companion and that’s been something that parents have been asking for a long time. So we’re finally gonna do that. So it’s it’s exciting. And anyways, those are some of the things that we do to try to bring it full circle for our population.

Alycia Anderson: It is so powerful and there’s so many layers to empowerment there for a community that has been overlooked for way too long. And personally I’m obsessed with the workplace component. And the social component of matching buddies together, and not only experiencing life together, whether it’s socially or work or a school, but also just becoming besties and like understanding that you can create relationships like that.

And I love that you’re launching a dating app. Like my husband is a wheelchair user too, and I, growing up, I know my disability is different, but. I have an identical able-bodied twin sister, and they’d always be like, oh, your sister’s never gonna get married. She’s never gonna do, and just these misconceptions that disabled people don’t live full lives and don’t have the same wants as everyone else is just such a miss and creating, creating platforms and organizations and partnerships from big corporate partnership deals to just like the one-on-one at school to, that’s so huge and all those people are gonna those children are gonna become the CEOs that are gonna then hire these hire disabled people no matter what disabled disability it is, and not even think twice about it and understand their value.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: And that’s already happening.

Alycia Anderson: So beautiful.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: So how did you end up meeting your husband then? If he’s got, he’s in a wheelchair.

Alycia Anderson: Oh, I like it. Turn in the interview to me. Yeah,

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Because it’s so challenging to meet you’ve done things that you might share in common or want to share in common. Not that you obviously, have to do that, but I’m just

Alycia Anderson: No, I would love to. We met at, we both competed in wheelchair tennis our whole lives, and we met at sports camp and we were 12. And then just stayed in contact. And I actually never thought I would marry the guy in the wheelchair, to be honest with you. I thought in my mind for a long time, I need somebody to carry me up a mountain if I need it.

But he does he, he understands this path more than all of the able-bodied like relationships that I had, that I was constantly, we met by organizations putting us together and creating relationships that we could really trust and feel like we could be ourselves fully.

So it’s powerful what you’re doing. I’m getting the chills again, up and down my arms and,

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: I like to hear that because it’s like how we try to figure out how would the love thing work in our, launching of this Bumble Buddies concept and how can we connect people? Because there is just we have a so many of our people now out in the workforce and living out in the community they wanna fall in love. Love’s the greatest force in the history of the universe, right?

But nothing even comes close. So if they don’t have that opportunity, they’re just missing the best thing of best quality of life, right? The best thing that life has to offer. I’m really trying to figure that out. But it’s good to know how you did it.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah, from a relationship standpoint, I think the biggest blocker for us was misconceptions honestly, from the people, some of the people that were closest to us. Don’t marry her, she’s not gonna be able to take care of you, or, things like that. And so it’s really like understanding our own bias from like the people that are the closest to us, whispering in our ears that then take it outward.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Right.

Alycia Anderson: Those people that are the closest that they don’t believe like that you two can come together. You have a lot of self doubt, if it’s your immediate family saying those things.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: People make it really tough. Yeah.

They doubt. They don’t think . We still deal with that with a lot with parents that don’t think that their kids can get out there and can’t have a job and can’t be independent. They cannot fall in love

Alycia Anderson: I think the work that you’re doing with parents is really important with the the new arm of your organization because I get that a lot from parents too. Like, how do I allow them to fall down and figure out how to get back up on their own. And it’s like you just do it. Like you have to do it.

Let, because that was the most powerful thing that my parents did for me, was like, adapt what I needed. And then they made me figure it out otherwise, because the world is not ever gonna be perfect and you gotta be able to be quick on your feet and figure it out quick on my wheels

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: You’re right. A hundred percent. Anyway, that’s great. Good info for me to have.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. What do you think some of the, what do you tell companies that are considering partnering with you and wanting to hire, but they’re afraid?

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: I tell this, if I can get to the CEO, to start, it’s always obviously helpful. But then the buy-in of the whole corporate culture is key for sustainability, right? Even if the CEO starts it or pushes it. doesn’t last unless the whole company buys in and the other employees get connected. My, my pitch always, not always, but often is, so much of, the responsibility of these companies is create a culture and what kind of culture do you want to create and what’s culture to you and what’s it mean to you? And I think a culture of giving a culture of caring, sets an incredible tone and an incredible. standard for your employees, and that as a result of feeling that or expressing that culture out there to your employees, you’re gonna improve retention all the way across the board. You’re gonna imp productivity across the board, improve the happiness factor. You still Are, population is generally really happy just upbeat, happy to come to work, happy to be part of a team, and I think that’s addictive.

And I, think if you wanna have that kind of an environment where you have people that are showing up and happy to be at work and excited about your mission, excited to be part of your culture, our population’s a secret sauce and you want to put them there, and at the same time, you know you’re gonna get a first class employee that’s gonna be reliable.

It’s gonna show up, it’s gonna be excited. They’re not gonna jump jobs in two years or three years. They’re not gonna be looking to move away or move up. It does happen. Some of our people, the jobs don’t work out or they maybe get a promotion or they get a job somewhere else. It does happen, which is, good often really a positive sign.

But, I think it’s wanting to get people who share our value system and share the concept that with diversity in the workforce and the energy that our population brings to the table. You win big time. And if you wanna win, you gotta join Best Buddies and you gotta get these people and your companies working. Because that’s the ticket to success.

Alycia Anderson: Totally. And if I could repeat your retention of disabled employees is 90% retention. Is that what you said in the beginning?

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: It moves around between 90 -93, so it’s pretty high, but, yeah, no, it’s high. And and they stay years and years, some of them. And we’ve got a guy up in Boston now, I think he’s a millionaire now in the pension plan. He’s got over a million dollars in his pension plan.

He’s been there 30 plus years.

Alycia Anderson: Wow.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: So that’s very unusual situation but in another 30 years, whoever’s running this thing’s gonna be there and they’re gonna have a bunch of people that are gonna be part of a 401k or a pension plan, and they’re gonna be millionaires ’cause they’re gonna stick around for 40 years.

The mistake a lot of people make is they jump all the time. I tell that to my kids. It’s great to move around if that’s what your passion is, but when you stick with it and you’re disciplining you, you’re, you sustain yourself in a certain job and you slowly grow and you put away the savings every year and you just keep grinding and you love what you do. Stick with it and hammer, and then you move up. The one day you wake up and you’re at the top of the ladder and your income’s beyond what you ever dream possible, and you got a huge savings and you love going to work every single day. It’s pretty hard to beat. You gotta be in a thing that you’re passionate about and you gotta love going to work every day. Obviously you gotta be happy, so you gotta find the right job. but if you got that job, you just keep hammering, you’re gonna end up doing really well. So we try to find, these jobs that really resonate with our population, jobs that they want. As we call it, it’s person-centered planning, person-centered employment. So giving them the opportunity when they’re younger to have internships or giving ’em the opportunity to go through the different jobs that are out there. And letting, working with our population to figure out what do they really want to do, what areas do they wanna work in? They’re, super smart and really vocal and many of our participants, are really clear on where they want to go and what they want to do.

And some of them work for the NFL and some of them work for some Sephora, and some of them work at Wells Fargo. So it just depends on their interest, just like all of us. But when you lock the right fit, it’s a home run.

Alycia Anderson: And having pensions to retire in is an aha moment for our community too. So that’s amazing. That’s absolutely amazing. It.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Just financial independence is huge for anybody, right? For all of us.

Alycia Anderson: Of course.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: You want to go out to dinner, you wanna be able to, take your girl or your guy out or whatever it is, and have a Saturday night or go to the movies and. For them to have a paycheck every two weeks.

It’s just huge. It’s, it’s life changing, honestly. And I, I can’t imagine not having my job.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah, you’re changing the world. I love it. I’m so thrilled about this conversation. Oh my God, thank you so much.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Yeah.

Alycia Anderson: Okay any last thoughts? I’m, we’re in the show notes, we’re gonna leave all the information. Like how do, we’ve got big companies that follow the show. All my clients do pitch ’em.

How do we get involved? How do we start donating and being a part of this amazing movement.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Yeah, join us, BestBuddies.org. my info’s public, AnthonyShriver@BestBuddies.org. You can send me an email, I’d love to have people join the force. As I said, we’ve got incredible companies, whether it’s, again, Coca-Cola or whether it’s, Wells Fargo or TJ Max. We’ve got so many companies that are in this thing thriving and, finding it super beneficial, getting our population out there. We got companies that have their employees out at our walks, we do almost 70 walks throughout the country, and it’s a great way to get employee engagement, get employees out there with their kids.

To see where the money goes and what we’re doing, to get buddies working in these companies. A huge opportunity to get your kids to become part of best buddies in their schools. Starting a school chapter, you know, getting involved in our local activations in these different states or, international corporate companies that maybe follow this or, you’re involved in, they want to get something going.

In one of the countries where we have programming, we’re excited, ready to go. Someone’s a developer and they wanna allocate, apartment units for us to set up best place living near a university, it’s great. There’s just so many things that you can do, so many ways for your kids to participate or you to participate as an adult, or you to participate as a leader.

Or if you’re a elected official and you work in Washington you can support us with federal money. How you can support us at the state level. If you’re in a state legislature, a lot of states, have helped support us. This year we’ll raise about $68 million. the US about another $35 million outside the us.

But some of that comes from states, some of it comes from counties, some of it comes from the feds. A lot of it comes from corporations, individuals walks, galas. I mean, we got so many pickleball events, we got a lot of different things going on. So there’s, I. Whatever your interests are, marathons, we gotta launching a big marathon in New York this year.Just a lot of great things going on. But easiest way to find out BestBuddies.org or shoot me an email. I respond to them all if you can believe it, but I do. And we’ll get you hooked up.

Alycia Anderson: A plug for you too. I had a girlfriend say I volunteered at a Best Buddies chapter for X amount of time during like college or something, and it was the best work life experience she has had yet.

So it was like a really beautiful experience from a volunteer standpoint to just give time and be a part of it all. So I wanted to tell you that too because Of course.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Yeah. Thank you.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: I love it.

Alycia Anderson: Yeah. I warned you before we started, we end the show with a pushing forward moment. It’s just a little mantra. It’s of some motivation to give to our community to leave this and go make a difference, too. Do you have a little pushing forward moment that you can gift away to our community today and to me?

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: I feel like service is God’s work, God’s plan and I don’t think God makes mistakes and all of our participants are, part of the beauty of God’s plan, and he is put everybody in this world for a reason and I think. If you wanna be inspired and connected to your soul or to your faith, to be involved in work like Best Buddies and work that you’re doing, I think is transformative and inspiring and makes you feel great about your life, makes you happier, it makes your children happier, it makes you have a better marriage you’re involved in service and you’re giving back.

’cause in the end of the day, I really feel the servants are the ones who are gonna win the race. They’re really the ones that end up, leading the charge, and have the best lives, and then have eternal life and end up in heaven by the grace of God. So I hope they’ll jump on the bandwagon.

Alycia Anderson: I love it. Thank you so much for your time. I’ll never forget this day. It has been my pleasure to meet you and just thank you so much for everything.

Anthony Kennedy Shriver: Thank you for your interest.

Alycia Anderson: I know our community is freaking out and I’m freaking out with you. Thank you so much for joining us on this episode. This has been Pushing Forward with Alycia and Anthony, and that is how we roll on this podcast.