By Erin Kayata
Growing up, Kim Ho heard her stepbrother, Ronnie, rave about his summers at Camp Jabberwocky, a camp on Martha’s Vineyard for people with disabilities. For four weeks every summer, her stepbrother would get to go horseback riding, visit the beach and bond with other campers.
When Ho was a teenager, she became a volunteer for Camp Jabberwocky, which is the oldest sleepaway camp for people with disabilities in America and serves campers free of charge. Her time volunteering sparked a lifelong passion for not only the camp, but for working in speech.
Ho is now an assistant clinical professor in communications sciences and disorders and has 38 summers volunteering at Camp Jabberwocky under her belt, befriending many of the campers over the years. Upon joining Northeastern three years ago, she decided to give students the opportunity to volunteer at the camp, hoping the experience would spark the same inspiration in them as it did for her.
“It’s really become a Northeastern thing,” Ho said. “The students write testimonials for me and one said it was life-changing for her, that it completely changed what she thought she wants to do and how she thinks about being a speech pathologist. You learn how to take care of people for an entire two weeks and their perspective about how it feels to have a disability. They can’t give you that in a classroom.”
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