Local Author Celebrated for Her Story of Inclusion

Local author Kimberly Ann Hubbard and illustrator Dionel Figueroa join us to share the inspiration for their book, "The Blessing of Friendships", a story of how children with disabilities are perceived

Differences in others.

C1 the blessing of friendships is a new book by st.

Joseph resident, kimberly ann hubbard.

She's joining us to tell us about the book.

Thanks for joining us.

Thank you.

Welcome everyone.

The idea about the story thank you.

Thank you.

Kimberly, thank you so much and her friend us.

Thank you.

I know this is to help children better understand and relate to children with special needs.

What an amazing story kimberly has.

Can you tell us a little bit it.

Yes.

Well, i know that kimberly has been working really hard on this project.

When she got a hold of me, she had a vision of being able to present this as a way to communicate with young children on different views of people with down syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy in a way, they may look different or talk different and they are still like us and we all need love and understanding.

It's a really neat book.

This is the illustration that the book covers shows.

And you know, really neat.

Really neat that you came together to do this.

I know kimberly is an educator.

She has her degree in special ed and has cerebral palsy.

What a neat partnership.

What made you want to get involved in this?

She goes to church with me and she reached out oh, a little earlier last year on the project and told me what she had visioned and i thought it was just a great way to communicate with our kids in our community.

So when she told me about it, i was just more than happy to just jump on board and help her see this project through.

Did you have an idea how you wanted to do these illustrations?

It looks like there's specific things about each character you illustrated.

Does one of them look like kimberly when she was a child?

It was difficult to illustrate like down syndrome and autism.

We went through a lot of rough draft and all of this was her vision.

I would talk to her through e-mails and zoom meetings a lot.

Together we were able to come up with these characters and bring them to life and you know a lot of it i will say thanks to her, she helped me out a lot to try to come up with these ideas and everything.

Well, don't take anything away from you because you're a tremendous artist.

What is really interesting it's told from the perspective of a class mate or a friend or neighbor.

And how they envision the special needs child.

One of the pages even says, one time we had to use a different classroom while ours was being painted and eric became upset.

It's from that child's perspective.

What a great book for parents.

Thank you so much for your work