Mission
To empower individuals with disabilities and their families through community education on special education law, disability rights, and advocacy, while amplifying voices through creative expression in the arts.
Our Story
This work started in 2007, long before it had a name most people would recognize. What follows is how a group of educators, caregivers, and families built it, year by year.
A door opens in Southwestern Illinois
A small group of educators and caregivers began working directly with children whose needs the systems around them were not meeting. Families of children with autism, ADHD, and developmental delays started reaching out, and the answer was always yes.
That decision, to keep showing up for children other programs turned away, is the seed of everything that followed.
PTL Childcare
The work took a name. Padgett Therapeutic Learning Childcare, known to families as PTL Childcare, formalized what had been happening informally: specialized, patient care for children other providers were not equipped to serve.
PTL is where this organization learned how to build around a child instead of asking a child to fit a program.
The work deepens
PTL Childcare served families across Southwestern Illinois with specialized support for children with autism, ADHD, traumatic brain injuries, and developmental delays.
Just as importantly, the team began working directly with the parents and caregivers raising them. Families kept saying the same thing: no one explains any of this to us.
Joining a national network
PTL Childcare became an affiliate of the Youth Volunteer Corps, an international service-learning network known for rigorous outcomes measurement and its work with young people who are too often overlooked.
The affiliation brought training, evaluation standards, and a wider community of practice.
A board, and a nonprofit
The work formalized into a nonprofit. A founding board came together around it, bringing professional expertise and lived experience in equal measure: a registered nurse, a licensed clinical social worker, special educators, and parents.
Programming has run continuously ever since.
In memory of Stephen Watson
Founding board member Stephen Watson passed away in October 2020. He believed in this work before it had funding, an office, or a name most people recognized.
The foundation this organization stands on is partly his.
SIP Arts Foundation
Nearly two decades of community work now operate under one nonprofit: Southern Illinois Pathways for advocacy and education, Pathways to Expression for inclusive arts, and SIP Media and Co. for publishing community voices.
Same commitment. More people carrying it.
Nearly two decades of showing up
These are the families who kept coming back. The children who grew into self-advocates. The parents who walked in with a folder of paperwork and walked out with a plan.
Every photograph here is a family who found their footing in a system that was not built for them.
