We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jessica Rodriguez a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jessica, appreciate you joining us today. We’re complete cheeseballs and so we love asking folks to share the most heartwarming moment from their career – do you have a touching moment you can share with us?

You don’t always realize the difference you’re making in the lives of others. Hearing feedback from parents about how the Special Needs Aquatic Program has impacted their child and family, is my “why”. We have had the privilege to provide adaptive swimming lessons for 12 months, to over 50 children. It fills me with joy and pride to hear our swimmer’s parent tell me that their child looks forward to swim lesson all week or that they never thought their child could be an independent swimmer.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m a Physical Therapist, with 13 years in practice. I have specialized in Pediatrics and Aquatics during my career. To my core, I enjoy helping others and spreading kindness and joy. I have worked tirelessly to create aquatic programs and opportunities for the special needs community. In 2016, I started an aquatic-based private Physical Therapy practice. In 2019, I volunteered with the Special Olympics to create and recruit swim coaches to start a swim team for adolescents. In 2020, I started a nonprofit to provide adaptive swimming lessons and group aquatic classes, through a partnership with Yarrow YMCA. Throughout my career as a Pediatric Physical Therapist, I heard how difficult it was for my clients to find quality swim instruction, appropriate for their child. I adapted the Special Needs Aquatic Program (SNAP) from two other existing aquatic programs. It was important to our board to provide swim lessons that were both effective and affordable. We have plans to continue to expand access in the coming year, to become a regional center vendor, provide scholarships through grant funding and provided our services in more YMCA facilities. We know that our program is important, needed and has huge potential for growth. Our team is thrilled to continue to expand our essential services.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I took the Daring to Lead workshop, based on the book and work of Brene Brown. It has been a wonderful, actionable addition to my toolkit, as a new leader. I especially enjoyed using her values work with our team, to discover our organizations core values. We chose: Compassion, Inclusion, Teamwork. These will be the values reflected in the decisions of our board of directors. These will be the values that we will expect our staff to demonstrate. Having values that support our mission is important for our organization and team.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

The pandemic, lockdown and delays in opening our program lead to obstacles, speed bumps and detours. We had to stay focused, get creative and maintain forward momentum. Being able to quickly pivot and be flexible was essential. The pandemic created an unexpected 18 month delay in our planned opening. We had to re-negotiable pool space, transition an in-person start-up fundraising event to a virtual platform and hire new staff members. Although the road was definitely bumpy and unexpected, we were still able to open and operate a successful program.

Contact Info:

• Website: snapaquatics.org
• Instagram: snapwithsteppingstones
• Facebook: SNAP with Stepping Stones