Background: With a rough estimation of 14.1 million children in the US with special needs, many parents and children are experiencing detrimental effects such as social isolation, depression, and loneliness (HRSA, 2022; Kwan et al., 2020; Park & Lee, 2022). This capstone supports the need for occupational therapy expertise to build a training program designed to educate and equip the volunteers who are working with children with special needs. Research has shown how social support impacts families with a child with special needs, improving parent’s mental health and the child’s social-emotional well-being. This highlights the need for more community-based resources, such as local churches, to better support these families. Local churches, like many other community resources, often rely heavily on volunteers. Having a comprehensive volunteer training program helps the church serve more children with special needs and support volunteer retention. With enough trained volunteers, churches can serve as a vital social support by providing the parents time to grow spiritually and connect with other adults with their minds at ease knowing their child is safe. In turn, having this community-based resource positively impacts the child and the parent’s health and overall well-being. Creating and implementing a comprehensive volunteer training program for a local church will give the childrens ministry the resources it needs to further serve children with special needs and their families.

Objective: The purpose of this project is to develop a volunteer training program designed to educate the volunteers and provide them an opportunity to apply their knowledge via case studies. Additionally, the program will be implemented, and effectiveness will be evaluated.

ACOTE area: This capstone project’s primary ACOTE area of focus is program development, focusing on developing a volunteer training program for a local church, serving as a community-based resource for families with a special needs child. Secondary areas relevant to this capstone project is education and research.

Methods: A quasi-experimental one-group pretest-posttest design was utilized to measure the participants’ confidence using an original Self-Efficacy Assessment. Four participants individually attended this training virtually for a total of two hours. Participants were volunteers within the childrens ministry at the Sanctuary in Him. The Covariate Demographics assessment and Self-Efficacy assessment data awas collected immediately before the volunteer training program and the Self-Efficacy assessment and Post-Volunteer Training Feedback assessment data was collected immediately afterwards. Data was collected immediately before and after the volunteer training program was presented. The volunteer training program was developed after a thorough literature review, examination of various existing informational programs, and an in-depth study of various special needs conditions. A Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test was used to analyze the data due to a small sample size (n=4).

Results: Despite there being no statistically significant difference (p-value = .068), in the participants’ confidence levels, each volunteer reported an increase in confidence from the pretest to the posttest. Feedback from the Post-Volunteer Training Feedback assessment reported the training being useful and recommended the training be implemented prior to becoming a volunteer.

Conclusion: Implementing this training would help volunteers working with children with special needs to feel more confident, which addresses the need for volunteers to be properly trained in order to feel confident when working with this population. This provides the Sanctuary in Him, a local church which serves as a community-based resource, with the volunteers needed to better assist children with special needs. Furthermore, the church can provide support to families who have a child with special needs and make a long-lasting, positive impact in each of the family members’ lives.