award winning
discussion guide
About Us
Choices, Inc. was founded and incorporated in 1988 for the purpose of developing educational resources for persons with developmental disabilities who would benefit from a multimedia approach to their sexuality education. It was eventually granted 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status.
Choices, Inc. was founded to help persons with intellectual challenges experience choices in their lives by offering them something so taken for granted by the general population: information about their social and sexual development.
Choices, Inc. provides sexuality education through video media to its target audiences:
- Individuals
- Family members
- Caregivers
- Professionals
- Job coaches
- Friends
Mary Ann Carmody, Founder and President of Choices, Inc., and Producer of these three films, is a graduate of Georgetown University School of Nursing, whose professional experience has always been in the mental health and developmental disability fields.
For nearly 30 years, her practice area within these fields has been as a sexuality educator. She was certified by the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists in 1986 and has undergone rigorous peer review for recertification every five years thereafter.
Ms. Carmody has spent decades as an advocate for people with intellectual disabilities through counseling, lecturing and producing educational films. The films illustrate that they too deserve choices about whom they want to share their feelings and lives with and how they want to express their sexuality. In order to produce the films, Ms. Carmody founded Choices, Inc. to ensure that there would be resources for the sexuality education of persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Under her leadership, Choices, Inc. has produced three award-winning films: Person to Person, Roots & Wings, and Making Connections. An outgrowth of the Making Connections film was the establishment of a friendship and dating organization, also called Making Connections. It was a subsidiary of DateAble, Inc. that served individuals in the Metropolitan Washington, DC area until 2004.