ON A MISSION

Corny’s Christmas Card Drive restarts after death of friend, continuing his journey to prevent loneliness

Corny and Cassie.

What a team.

What an unlikely team.

But what an effective team. Cornelious Beasley was a man in his 70s with cerebral palsy.

Cassie Greenhill was an Oak Forest High School alum and college student at Aurora University who thought she wanted to be a special-education teacher.

The two met in 2019 at the Shady Oaks Camps for People With Disabilities in Homer Glen.

As they got to know each other and became friends, they started a project in which they coaxed volunteers to write and send holiday cards to people with disabilities who live in residence homes.

Cornelius Beasley and Cassie Greenhill formed a friendship in 2019 and together cooked up a project to send holiday cards to people in residence houses.

CASSIE GREENHILL

It was a simple gesture but one she said was important. She was inspired by Corny’s unflagging spirit.

“He didn’t have a lot of friends or family left,” she sa@!id. “He was all there upstairs. He could cognitively understand what was going on around him. He was just stuck in a body he could not control.

“He loved being social and loved being with people.”

Greenhill knows a little something about disabilities. She and her twin sister, Rachel, have a form of autism that allowed them to experience their upbringing from two different perspectives.

“I like to say we had a toe in both worlds,” Cassie said. “We weren’t completely in the special ed world, and we weren’t in the mainstream world either. We were in and out of each world.”

But that didn’t stop them from going to college at Aurora University, and it didn’t stop them from helping people.

Cassie, who is currently a paraprofessional working with special education students at Sandburg High School in Orland Park, was saddened in 2020 when

Beasley died after contracting COVID-19, and she was not able to keep the holiday card project going because of coronavirus concerns.

“I only knew him for a year, but his death was still a big blow to me,” she said. “He was one of the first campers that I really bonded with.

“Meeting him changed my course because I was in college, and I was going to become a special-education teacher. But there are so many more things needed to be done after the transition program that I changed my course to disability studies.”

She said she wanted to work on a master’s degree and someday run her own camp.

In Beasley’s memory, Greenhill has resurrected the holiday card project. It’s now known as Corny’s Christmas Card Drive.

Many of the cards will be going to adults who are in the Shady Oaks East of Lutheran Social Services of Illinois, also located in Homer Glen.

Greenhill has an army of people helping her and she is hoping to provide more than 500 handmade cards to residents.

She’s recruited her family, including her grandmother Yolanda McCombs, to join students from Oak Forest and Sandburg high schools, Central Middle School in Tinley Park and Brookfield-LaGrange Park School District 95 in creating and sending the cards.

Greenhill has a lot of connections and she is not bashful about asking anyone she knows to help because she is passionate about this cause.

So far, they’ve collected 743 cards and people donated socks, deodorant and two Amazon Fire sticks

She said most of the people who have reached the residence house stage don’t have many friends or family left.

“The project is to prevent loneliness for those with disabilities in residential homes, mostly adults,” she said. “When they receive cards, they don’t feel as lonely.”

For those at Shady Hill, she has some background on the residents and encourages writers to cater their cards to those interests.

Some are sports fans. Some are music fans.

One resident can’t read and likes pictures and loves the color yellow.

The Greenhill twins have helped Aurora University’s new Pathways program, which is an initiative for college students with autism. It also reaches out to high school students with autism via summer camps.

Rachel used knitting and crocheting as therapy and now sells her work on etsy.com under RachelsKnitShop18. She said she crochets everything from animals to people including horror movie characters, TV actors and first responders.