Founder of wheelchair dance team continues to empower women with disabilities during pandemic

Yahoo Life sat down with the founder of The Rollettes, Chelsie Hill, to share how her team continues to break down boundaries and shift perspectives through dance.

Video Transcript

CHELSIE HILL: I feel like it was important to keep Rollettes active through this pandemic because I know what it feels like to feel alone, to feel like nobody understands, to feel like you're so isolated. And now the entire world is feeling isolated. Let's connect. Let's do something together. Let's do something positive.

My name is Chelsie Hill. I am the founder of The Rollettes wheelchair dance team based here in Los Angeles. Our mission is to empower women with disabilities to live boundlessly and shift perspective through dance.

I was a competitive dancer my entire life. When I was a senior in high school, I was out at a party with friends and got into the car with a friend that was drinking. And we ended up hitting a tree head on, which left me a T10 spinal-cord injury.

So it was very, very early on into my injury that I found that fire of dance back inside of me. I reached out to girls on social media and asked them to come and dance with me in my hometown, and each year it became like a reunion. And that's really where all of this started was just wanting friends.

You don't really realize the impact you have on people when you're just living your life day to day because you're passionate about something. Four or five years ago, wheelchair dancing was never shown ever. And whenever I go onto social media, I always look at all of the people that are now trying out wheelchair dancing. They're trying dance tutorials. They're taking my classes on Instagram. And it's really empowering to me to know that we are making an impact together.

I'm very lucky to be able to travel and work with my best friends. There there's so many moments over the years that I could think back to. I think about representing the United States and wheelchair dancing. I think about being able to share my story and dance on "Ellen," to be able to travel all the way to Italy and showcase diversity and inclusion and disability.

Because of the world that we're in right now with the pandemic, it's obviously put a huge damper on being able to connect with people one on one and in person. We're always trying to evolve. We right away got together and we strategized how can we still empower women with disabilities yet not have to be face to face?

You know, I have so many girls a part of our Boundless Babe Society, which is our mentorship group, and all of them were like, well, I have to put my goals on hold. And I was thinking, no. If anything, we just reroute, and we figure out, and we adapt. Can we provide more classes? Can we provide more challenges?

As people that were walking or people that have been born with disabilities, we have learned to have to adapt to the culture around. Us just because there's a pandemic going on doesn't mean we have to stop our goals. It just means we might have to take another route.

For us, social media has become a place where we are able to give out information, give challenges, give IG Live classes. And, to be honest, we've been able to connect so much more to our community because of that.

We did a happy-hour Zoom with women from all over the world. The reason why we chose to do that is because it was on GAAD, which is Global Accessibility Awareness Day-- just showcasing the power of technology. And it was such a beautiful day that we decided to actually do a monthly virtual girls night where girls can just hop on Zoom, and we can play some games. We can break off into groups.

And we did dance classes. We did stretching. We did cardio, meditation. We did a cooking class-- a lot of different things going on through that day.

People with disabilities, we're constantly fighting so many different emotions in our head, whether it's am I enough? Nobody can relate to me. But then you pull up the phone, and you see all these people that are able to relate. It's just so empowering. It's like rolling into a room at The Rollettes experience where everyone is at eye level. It's just something that is just so unspoken, but it's so powerful.

There is a lot of boundaries that we've been able to break down, but to be honest, there's so many more we have to break down, and we're just getting started.