Pen Pals
April 2023
Pen Pals
Texting pals? FaceTime pals? No, we’re talking about pen pals – that thing you’ll have to teach your children and grandchildren about years from now. No matter how much technology advances, the importance of true friendships will always remain. But the time it takes to write someone a handwritten letter, the excitement and anticipation of waiting for a response, the slow process of getting to know someone over time – these are things that, unfortunately, are few and far between in our modern world. That’s one of the reasons Erin Alvino and Stephanie da Costa started the incredible UI Pen Pal Program back in February.
This will be a special edition, extra-thorough post because there’s too much goodness to leave anything out.
One of our Speech Therapists, Erin Alvino, recently moved and transferred from our Livingston location to our Long Branch location – but she wanted to continue collaborating through activities and community outings between Livingston and Long Branch. Erin and Stephanie da Costa, one of our Speech and Language Pathologists in Livingston, teamed up and decided upon a pen pal program; they felt it would be the best way for clients from both facilities to interact and make lifelong friendships.
Sometimes, though, these ideas seem good on paper but don’t play out well in reality. Thankfully, this situation was the exact opposite. Clients from both locations showed an overwhelming amount of interest, and each location quickly had 11 clients sign up for the program for a total of 22 participants.
I get by with a little help from my friends…
John Lennon
The clients weren’t the only ones excited; Stephanie and Erin realized that their first task at hand would be to gather information about the clients so they could match the pen pals properly.
So, in another brilliant move, Erin used her speech therapy session with two clients in Long Branch to generate a survey that would allow Stephanie and Erin to become, in Erin’s own words, “the ultimate matchmakers”. Some of the survey questions included favorite type of music, hobbies, describing themselves in three words, and expectations from the pen pal program.
Bottom row from left to right: Nicole, Shonna, & Norman
A friend may well be the masterpiece of nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Long Branch clients kicked it off by taking up their pens, pencils, or their keyboards to create the first round of letters. We’ll let Erin describe the rest:
“The clients worked on their letters within Speech Therapy, Cognitive Therapy, and OT sessions where they focused on including different parts of the letter, organization of their text, and legibility.
Clients also worked on creating Valentine’s Day cards with the help of a cricut machine during their Therapeutic Enrichment groups. While all this was taking place in Long Branch, Stephanie created a special Pen Pal group that began meeting twice a month to work on their own letters. Within Stephanie’s group, clients were creating Valentine’s Day cards and learning about their pen pals in Long Branch. In addition, other departments in Livingston including Cognitive Therapy, TRU, and OT jumped in to help finish up the cards in order to send them before the big holiday rush.
I get at least one inquiry a day about when we’re going to meet our pen pals! But for now, we’re going to keep the mystery alive and stick to snail mail!”
Well, in April, that opportunity came. The Long Branch facility planned to bring the clients to Livingston to take part in the annual Spring Bazaar sale, with the additional intent of have the pen pals finally meet in person.
We can confidently say that Erin and Stephanie should become professional matchmakers; the clients couldn’t stop smiling and talking after meeting each other. (On second thought, we’re not letting Stephanie or Erin leave their day jobs.) One pair of pen pals have actually been close friends for many years but haven’t seen each other in a long time. Other pen pals were meeting one another for the first time and hit it off right away because of the interests they share. For the clients, it was a day that lived up to all of their expectations.
In this era of instant gratification, the UI Pen Pal Program proves that the slow, deep blossoming of relationships will never go out of style. Thank you Erin and Stephanie for creating such an impactful, one-of-a-kind therapy group; we’ll send our Thank You cards in the mail.
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