We would like to thank Sam Odrowski and the Orangeville Citizen for attending our 5 year anniversary open house in December, and for this fantastic article!
Branching Out Support Services celebrates five years of supporting Orangeville’s neurodiverse community
written by Sam Odrowski
Branching Out Support Services (BOSS), an Orangeville-based social enterprise that provides programming and purpose to indi- viduals with disabilities, is celebrating five years in the community.
BOSS held a five-year anniversary party at the Westminster Church in Orangeville on Dec. 13, with an open house and dance, sponsored by IODE Headwaters.
The organization has grown significantly since first opening its doors in December 2019 when it started with just 10 clients. BOSS now consistently serves more than 50 people with its daily programming, men- tal health platform, and one-on-one support services. BOSS also does education and advocacy about how to best serve people with disabilities through training sessions at businesses, not-for-profits, corporations and municipalities.
Speaking with Kimberly Van Ryn, BOSS’s founder, she said celebrating the organization’s fifth anniversary feels surreal when looking at its early beginnings.
“It’s a little unimaginable considering how we started, with so much anticipation, and then COVID happened four months after we opened,” she explained. “We had to do programming in a way that we’d never even considered for neurodivergent people… and we did that for three full years.”
Van Ryn said BOSS’s evolution has been much different than she expected but in a positive way.
“It made us slow down a little bit and really think about what this was and how to build it well, so that we could last five years, 10 years,” she remarked.
Speaking on her journey towards starting BOSS, Van Ryn said she was already working in developmental services, supporting people with disabilities, but wanted to drive positive change in a more meaningful way.
“When I decided to start my own business, it was a real drive to start it as a social enterprise, not a nonprofit, so that we could provide the amount of transparency we wanted to in our services,” she said. “The drive was to be able to serve neurodivergent people in the community, but to also be able to do it in a little bit of a different way, so that choice was paramount.”
Deciding to take a more non-traditional approach to serving people with disabilities, BOSS’s clients have a great deal of autonomy in choosing what their days look like.
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