Liam McGinley
Creative Editor
On Friday, Sept. 19, the Disability Advocacy and Support Alliance (DASA) hosted an event for stress ball making and talking about coping mechanisms for stress. Participants had the option to fill the inside of their stress balls with either rice or their own handcrafted ‘oobleck’, made from corn starch and water. Participants also had the option to dye their water with various food dyes to create a more stunning and entertaining stress ball.
Due to Homecoming events, the attendance for this workshop was small, but it provided a more individualized and inclusive experience for participants. The executive board for DASA made sure everyone had a positive experience: whether that was because they were helping participants through the process of creating their stress balls or simply just getting to know everyone through engaging small talk.
Salem Amato ’27, president of DASA, said, “We had this event for the first time last year during midterms, and I thought it was important because I found that a lot of my friends or people I cared about didn’t know a lot about coping strategies.”
During the stress workshop, Amato and Liv Carter ’28, vice president of DASA, gave a presentation about ways to cope with stress based on personal experience. They mentioned various ways to deal with and recognize the signs of burnout.
Carter, who is a neuroscience major, also emphasized the importance of sleep when it comes to stress. They stated that sleep helps regulate the hippocampus area of the brain. Stress causes the amygdala to expand, and this causes the stress area to increase without adequate rest time.
Amato introduced the idea that doing something is better than doing nothing, emphasizing the importance of breaking down everyday tasks into smaller, more manageable parts.
“I went looking around for things [stress toys] at different orgs and other places where they were given off of campus and found that a lot of them weren’t designed for the neurodivergent brain or they were just missing something,” Amato said. “So I decided why don’t we get people doing things with their hands while we can tell them some [coping strategies] ways that may be helpful to them.”
DASA has many more events planned for the fall semester. They plan to have a support web making event, interabled relationships, a workshop on how to get accommodations through the school, how to reach out to professors about accommodations and game nights.
“We have general meetings and fun meetings,” Carter said. “For general meetings, we are thinking of making it a rule that it will always be a bring your own game night because we have two hours together and the last time we did this it was so much fun.”
DASA looks forward to meeting more people at their events and they have made this a goal for this school year. DASA is open to everyone and is open to teaching others about how to be a better support system for people with disabilities.