McCall Madriago, a Staff Member at Telecare's SOAR, is Headed for the Deaflympics in Brazil!

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McCall Madriago, a Staff Member at Telecare's SOAR, is Headed for the Deaflympics in Brazil!

The Deaflympics is an international sporting event for deaf athletes that has a long and storied history dating back to 1924. McCall Madriago, a Personal Service Coordinator at Telecare SOAR, is headed to Brazil next month to represent the USA at the Deaflympics. We are so proud of McCall and all the hard work she has put in over the years to accomplish this!

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SOAR's Second Annual Telecare Games

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A little cool weather didn't stop the staff at SOAR from heating up the competition during their second annual Telecare games on Wednesday, June 15.

The scavenger hunt took place in Old Town Sacramento, where program staff teamed up, worked together, and acted out, to get ahead in the race.

"It was amazing to see the teams work together as well as the help members of the community," said SOAR Clinical Director Kezzia Bullen. "As a judge, the best part was the stop where the teams had to sing a railroad themed song to an actual train and capture it on video—one team even had choreography. Another clue had teams searching for a locally renowned 'mini' treat from Danny's Mini Donuts, but it proved challenging and our judges ended up with extra erroneous goodies, which was dubbed the 'pile of wrong.'" A delicious error indeed!

"At the end of the hunt, we laughed, told stories of the afternoon, and gave out the prizes over pizza," Kezzia said. "We cannot wait to do this event next year and make it even better!"

SOAR Gets Spirited!

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By Kezzia Bullen
Clinical Director at SOAR

SOAR has some very spirited team members and we like to have spirit week (yes, like in high school) a few times a year. We have a theme each week and one of them was celebrating Telecare’s 50th year anniversary! We all love to eat and we have a themed potluck each day of the week too. We know that working in this field is very stressful and is often not immediately rewarding (and can take a lot of energy.) So, we like to make things fun whenever we can–often it’s all that gets us through on really tough days.

A special thank you to Bisa and Sheila for their spirit leadership. Bisa made all the props and decorations each day; THANK YOU!  Everyone on the SOAR team participated and chipped in for a fun and food filled week. I feel incredibly lucky to work with this work family.

SOAR Spirit Week!

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Last month, we had another spirit week here at SOAR complete with a Telecare purple day to commemorate the 50th anniversary. Our spirit leaders, Bisa Peoples and Sheila McClay, also treated us each day with themed food! There is one thing we love to do up here in Sacramento and that is EAT! They kept us fueled up and ready to support our members in a upbeat and positive way. We always encourage our members to participate in the themes each day and this time we had a few join in on the fun. Every member of the SOAR team is a super hero every day but one day this week they dressed up to show their true colors. Thanks again to Sheila and Bisa for their culinary and planning support for yet another successful and fun spirit week!

Submitted by Kezzia Bullen, Clinical Director at SOAR

Happy 5 Year Anniversary, SOAR!

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We recently celebrated our 5 year anniversary as a program. There are several staff members that have been with us since start-up and the rest feel as though they have. We are a huge family up here in Sacramento that loves to have fun, so to celebrate our anniversary we competed in a scavenger hunt around downtown Sacramento that ended at Pizza Rock where we feasted, talked, laughed and some of us bragged about our hunting skills. The day was nearly ruined by inclement weather (storm of the century level winds and rain), but someone wanted us to have some fun and the rain and wind stopped for just long enough for the scavenger hunt to happen.

Submitted by Kezzia Bullen, Clinical Director @ SOAR