Every child should get to explore their world unbound.
Why community and encouragement are critical.
Our Mission
Our mission is to encourage and enable youth with Type 1 Diabetes so that their true identity, value, and potential is unbound from their diagnosis.
What’s at stake
Over 300,000 youth in US are living with Type 1 Diabetes.
During adolescence, these kids are being handed the keys to their own lives, health, and future, as they take on the mintue-by-minute management of their blood sugar.
Depression, anxiety among children with type 1 diabetes is much higher than their peers. Studies show that 36% of people with T1D will experience significant symptoms of burn-out.
Studies are also showing that youth who are involved with activities, camps, other families, and mentors that include other youth with T1D are significantly less effected by burnout, and say that it helps them not feel so alone with their diabetes.
We believe that the motivation to become unbound from Type 1 Diabetes will decrease burn-out, and improve the rate of depression and anxiety amongst these at-risk youth, it will foster a new generation contributors and advocates to the Type 1 Diabetes community, and most of all, let kids be kids.
Our Vision
Through the experience of ongoing mentorship relationships and seeing themselves accomplish their own goals, youth will discover themselves and a passion that gives them the reason and the motivation to take ownership of their Type 1 Diabetes management and strive for a healthy, joyful and fulfilling lifestyle.
Our Story
Six years after her diagnosis, our daughter doesn’t even remember what life was like before Type 1 Diabetes; we do. We remember a rambunctious, social, go-getter, ready for anything, anytime, anywhere. No fear, no anxiety, no awareness of how a pancreas worked.
We never expected she would be eleven and only have one option for Summer camp, or that things like sleepovers would be so nerve-racking. We weren’t prepared to challenge the school system and fight for our daughter’s basic care. We didn’t relate the our other parent friends as much anymore, as our lifestyle, routine, and struggles were now so different than theirs.
Our daughter is an amazing mathematician now, loves science, and loves creating experiences for people, but she often feels very alone in this. We encourage her to be aware of carbs and dosing and activity, but she’s eleven; she wants cake, she wants to run around the playground, she wants people like her to know who she is and not be that girl with a weird plastic box on her arm whose phone is always beeping.
We are so grateful that around Portland there is a great parent community already, medical resources, JRDF meetups, and a couple of Type 1 camps. However, there was something still really missing that we wanted to help foster more of, a community of friends and mentors within the young people in our area who have Type 1.
Our daughter is about to go into Middle School next year, which is scary. As we went through a really rough season at the beginning of the school year, we realized that without a motivating force in her life, other than her parents always nagging her to dose, self-management is going to be a very difficult transition. We hope that she finds her tribe and a few “dia-besites” that she can lean on in the next few years. We hope that for our whole community; that is why we felt the need to start Type 1 Unbound and start serving the community more by hosting events and facilitating this mentorship program.
We invite you to join the community and bring your encouragement on good days, and be vulnerable with each other on bad days. I believe our children will be the next generation of support for those newly or yet-to-be-diagnosed. Until there is a cure, a tightly woven community will be there to catch our kids as they fall through the stages of life with Type 1 diabetes and propel them back into life with purpose.
- Ryan Summers, Founder, President
- Dyea Summers, Co-Founder, Secretary
