This is a busy time of year for Margarita Gonzalez. She’s an insurance navigator at Trillium Health in Rochester, and with the enrollment period for New Yorkers to get health coverage through the state’s marketplace ending Saturday night, she’s been getting a lot of calls.

“I probably touched base with five clients this morning,” Gonzalez said just after noon on Friday, “and I’ll probably have at least five more today.”

Weekend Connections is a collection of some of the most noteworthy moments from the week on Connections with Evan Dawson. This episode includes conversations about:

• How parents react when they learn their children are part of the LGBTQ community;
• A battle between insects: using samurai wasps to kill stink bugs;
• How atheists feel about the concept of meaning.
  

What does a truly inclusive sports program look like? We sit down with members of the Unified Sports, an initiative whose teams include players with intellectual and developmental disabilities and their peers.

We hear from a Unified Sports athlete and from program organizers about how to create more inclusive schools and communities. In studio:

• Nathan Johnson, senior director of the Unified Sports program for Special Olympics New York
• Kyle Washburn, director of fitness for Special Olympics International
• Jacob Booher-Babcock, Special Olympics New York athlete and a member of the Athlete Congress (Brockport)
• Lesli Myers, superintendent of the Brockport Central School District

This story is reported from WXXI’s Inclusion Desk. 

The mayor of Ithaca has declared the city to be a “free range kids city.” Mayor Svante Myrick says he believes in the power of play, and Ithaca’s proclamation supports parents who give their kids unsupervised, unstructured play time.

This hour, we discuss the free-range parenting movement and how unstructured play can impact child development. We also talk about the barriers to free-range play and how parents can overcome them. Our guests:

• Erick Stephens, parent engagement specialist for the Healthi Kids initiative at Common Ground Health and father of four
• Emily Rittenberg, parenting educator for Nurture: Family Education & Guidance and mother of two
• Rusty Keeler, co-founder of the Just Play Project