The Colorado-based NSCD offers an array of physical activities, including alpine skiing, river rafting, horseback riding and rock climbing, to people with disabilities. The group said its activities have resulted in remarkable outcomes for participants, notably embarking on and continuing an active lifestyle, boosting confidence and improving the quality of life.     

It’s a story familiar to Kim Easton, the center’s president & CEO. In this Q&A, Easton, who joined NSCD in 2017 and leads the group amidst the most challenging global health crisis of the new century, underscored the importance of offering a lifeline to individuals, particularly to those who oscillate between despair and the will to live. It’s that kind of commitment that has allowed the NSCD to persevere and regroup after canceling its biggest event last year. NSCD concluded its 46th Annual Wells Fargo Ski Cup at Winter Park Resort last month. 

Colorado Politics: I was reading about you and in one article I think you said it’s very important for readers to have a strong sense of their own individual purpose and once you’ve pinpointed your purpose, things kind of come together. And it’s amazing, you said, how much energy and focus you gain and how opportunities align with your purpose and how they all become obvious. I’m really intrigued by that, if you can flesh that out for me.  

Kim Easton: As I’ve been on my own leadership journey and professional journey and personal journey through life, I have come into places where I’ve landed in a leadership role, whether I set out to do that or not. And at some point you have to step back and look at it and say, “Why is it that I end up in these spaces?” And I think it’s because I really do truly live from that place of living of purpose, and everything that we do, and it makes such a difference in our relationships and our leadership and our communities. So, my leadership purpose is to make a positive difference in the world by taking action, and I think that’s really the key of of why I ended up in leadership roles. It’s because when I see that there is an underdog or when I see that there is a situation that needs a problem solved or a resolution or a new direction, I just naturally take action.

CP: One of the reasons I’m intrigued, obviously, is because we’re aiming creatures, and if we’re not aiming, we kind of become purposeless, and when you’re purposeless, it’s hard to find meaning and it’s hard to be motivated. It’s hard to be encouraged. I wonder how you go through it whenever you’re starting in a new endeavor or maybe you’re not starting a new endeavor. Maybe you’re just trying to figure it out. I wonder what your thought process is like in arriving at a purpose, a sense of meaning.

KE: Yeah, spot on in terms of us humans, we strive for that sense of purpose, whether we call it purpose or soul searching. Different groups have different ways to look at it. For me, I think it really comes down to kind of four key components. One is having a vision and putting the words, the thinking and the emotion behind the vision that you have.

The next step is building relationships. That’s just another human component and it’s loaded in our DNA – that we seek out relationships. That’s how we define ourselves. It’s circular. It’s how we build purpose – it’s because of the relationships that we have in our lives. It’s why we have vision, and we struggle when we’re not in a relationship with other humans on many different levels. Another component is really around authenticity and vulnerability, and being willing to tap into those parts of your heart and your mind that maybe aren’t as clear, and asking for help and seeking out other leaders, other people that are working on solving the same problem and saying, “Hey! I wanted to make a difference here and I’m not really sure what’s next.”

And the last component is acting with boldness. I like boldness because it’s action oriented, courage is kind of a state of being. Boldness says that you’ve got clarity around your vision, you’ve built relationships with other people that want to take similar action, you’ve faced all of your vulnerabilities and built up the strength to take action, and then you have to take the action. And sometimes, that’s really hard.

CP: It’s difficult to be bold because that means acting on something, which might lead to failure, and I think a lot of people are really afraid to fail. I think the younger you are, you know, the more of a risk taker you are, but the older you get, the failures become really cost. Being bold means accepting the fact that you might fail.

KE: Likely will fail!

CP: Do you recommend that people actually write down their vision? Maybe writing it down is going to help.

KE: Absolutely! I mean I think everybody has their own methodology for finding that clarity. For some people, it’s journaling and writing it down. For other people, it’s talking to your friends and family and to coworkers and other mentors, and just saying the words out loud sometimes craft the vision in itself.

CP: You’re an early childhood educator and your research actually focuses on infant health and brain development. I’m interested. I’m a parent. I have at 10-year-old. I’m probably asking you something impossible, but briefly summarize for me – what are the ideal conditions for a really healthy brain development?

KE: Relationship, relationship and relationship.

CP: Is that right?

KE: 100%. Absolutely! It goes back to what we were saying before. We’re hard wired to be in a relationship, and being in a healthy relationship with multiple loving caring adults and other humans is the No. 1 most important component for early, infant and young child’s mental health development. All of other learning is fully dependent upon those relationships.

CP: You’re saying it is that good healthy relationship that truly nurtures a child? It’s what sets them up for a healthy brain development, and if they don’t have that, they suffer not just emotionally but also physiologically? Is that what you’re saying?

KE: Yes – absolutely! You’re spot on. Healthy relationships are the key to all all development. If an infant is living in a stressful or toxic environment, all of the brain energy focus goes to survival mode, and so there’s no leftover energy or focus to become intellectual, to become emotional, to become anything but the human in survival mode. So that loving, consistent, predictable home life is absolutely the key, and it’s also a really critical reason why we need to do better in investing in our early childhood systems, and we need to pay our early childhood educators a living wage.

CP: We’ve had two years of this shapeshifting virus. It has forced us to quarantine our kids for the most part, for a significant part. They hadn’t been to school physically. My son’s 10, and it was really difficult for him to be in a remote learning environment. I want to ask you – what do children lose out on when they’re in that remote learning setting and they’re not physically interacting with the kids, when they’re not socializing in that way?

KE: Oh, boy! We can spend hours talking about this topic, for sure. Since I’m not currently working on that field and my children are grown, I’m not living that day to day. But some things I believe to be happening would be that, particularly for school age children, much of the learning that happens at that point in their life is about learning who they are as a human in relationship to other people. And see? It always goes back to a relationship. And so if you are not in a setting where you have to share and negotiate and troubleshoot and problem-solve together and be in conflict and resolve conflict – all of those learning moments are happening in a school setting. And, obviously, even when you’re doing a Zoom class, you are together, so you may be interacting, but none of the social skills are being developed there.

Another component that I’m actually really concerned about more in the early childhood and in infant development stage is face coverings because infants and young children learn so much about their world, about other human beings, and about language by watching people’s facial expressions. And they have grown up in a world where when they’re outside of their home, they’re not seeing that. They’re not learning all of those cues and all those components, and it will be interesting to see what the long term impact on language development will be from this.

CP: Tell me about the National Sports Center for the Disabled. Let me define the question some more. What do you want to achieve in the the next 5 years?

KE: Well, if you’d asked me that two years ago, I probably would have a very different answer in terms of growing the number of participants that we are able to reach and the number of places that we are able to reach them. I think with COVID, we’re still seeing the impact of limited capacity, all of the restrictions around health and safety protocols, etc. So, I think we’re still in the mode of just wanting to deliver as much quality programming to as many participants as we can. I would say for the next 3 to 5 years, it’s gonna be about redefining what that strategy is, what our base line is. I really think our entire base line has been reset, and so we actually have some time set aside after the ski season in April with the leadership team to really dig into that. What is this new baseline – I don’t really like the phrase “the new normal” – for our organization? And then we can reestablish what the goals will be going forward. On the flip side of that, I think COVID has also given organizations like ours an opportunity to be more mindful, to really step back, slow down, somewhat downsize because we have to run on limited capacity, and get better focused. What are the programs that people are most actively seeking out and how do we get more of those to the right people?

CP: It’s been really difficult the last two years. We’ve had to deal with all kinds of tragedies. We’ve had to pivot and do all kinds of things. And again I ask this question because of your background – for folks who might have some nihilistic thoughts and they’re really struggling and they’re desperate, maybe frustrated, depressed on so many levels, what would be your advice to them?

KE: We know through the National Sports Center for the Disabled that the individuals that we serve, people living with disabilities, have been experiencing this sense of disconnection and isolation for many, many years in many, many ways. And so for those of us who haven’t had that experience, we can relate in a different way. For me, I can say in living in Colorado, one of the key things I can do and many of my friends can do is get out doors, be active, enjoy that sense of wonder and awe that have in nature, push our limits, and recreate outside of our homes. It’s been key to be able to continue to provide our programming to individuals living with disabilities because sometimes we are just that lifeline to rethink possibilities, to reimagine what they’re able and capable of doing, and to focus on what we can do rather than what we can’t do.