In the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, five very different high school students discover that they have much more in common than they previously thought. Today, in Saco, Thornton Academy junior Brooke Helgesen spends a lot of her free time making sure that every student – regardless of their physical or mental ability – feels included and valued in the classroom, the gymnasium, and on the athletic fields. Helgesen, 17, is the president of the local Best Buddies club at Thornton Academy. That club is dedicated to building one-on-one relationships between students with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Best Buddies is a global, non-profit organization, dedicated to ending the social, physical, and economic isolation of roughly 200 million people with intellectual and developmental disabilities by helping them form meaningful friendships with their peers. Brooke’s involvement with the Best Buddies program goes back several years to when she was a seventh-grade student. “I was kind of born into it,” she laughed. “My mom was very involved with the local Best Buddies program. My older brother was on the Unified Basketball team, and I was just always there for his practices and games; so they asked me to be the team manager.”

Brooke estimates that there are between 20 and 30 volunteers involved with the local Best Buddies program. Although her role as president of the Thornton Academy Best Buddies Club is time-consuming, she says that she “loves” the work and strongly supports the organization’s mission. “The Best Buddies club is a place where everybody is included and everyone has the same opportunities,” Brooke said. “We all just hang out, we help each other, including each other. We go out of our way to make each other’s day better.”

Brooke says the biggest reward of being involved with Best Buddies is seeing the smiles of the other club members. “I hope that I can just make someone’s day better,” she said. “And that they feel included and don’t see that they are different than anyone else.”