The toolkit framework and content is based on findings from two research activities. These are 1) expert interviews and 2) case studies.
The CLE project team conducted a series of 45- to 90-minute semi-structured telephone interviews with experts in the field of Community Life Engagement. Experts were chosen based on their level of expertise and diversity of perspectives. The team interviewed a total of 13 experts. Two were self-advocates, 5 were family members of people with IDD, 4 were service provider executives, 2 were state agency executives, and 2 were researchers. Some participants represented more than one role (e.g. both a provider executive and a parent of an adult with IDD).
Topics covered included the goals of Community Life Engagement, evidence of effective implementation of Community Life Engagement, barriers encountered and strategies used, and the role of Community Life Engagement as a support to other outcomes, including employment.
All interviews were recorded and transcribed, and the transcripts were then reviewed by the project team to identify common themes. From these expert interviews emerged the four Guideposts for Community Life Engagement.
Case studies of three service providers with a focus on high-quality Community Life Engagement supports were also conducted. The three service providers were selected from 38 initial nominees based on a number of factors, including number of individuals served, geographic location, quality of CLE services, and interest in participating in the research study. Across the three locations, the project team interviewed a total of 51 individuals: 23 provider administrators, managers, and direct support staff; 7 community partners; 16 individuals with IDD; and 5 family members.
Site visits were conducted at three locations:
WorkLink, a small San Francisco-based provider of day and employment supports to 38 individuals
LOQW, a larger provider of day and employment supports (600 individuals served) located in Northeast Missouri
KFI, a Maine-based provider of residential, day, and employment supports to 66 individuals
Use the sidebar on the left to read an overview of each provider.
Learning Opportunities/Quality Works (LOQW) provides service coordination, skills training, and employment services in Northeast Missouri. They serve over 600 customers annually and work in 14 counties.
Leveraging close community connections
LOQW works in very small and tight-knit communities. The smooth functioning of the organization can probably be attributed to the closeness of staff and that many staff have known each other, and many of the individuals they serve, their whole lives. LOQW makes excellent use of their community connections whether it’s finding a used bike or finding someone housing - someone there will know somebody in the community who has that resource to offer. As they said “It’s not magic. You just pick up the phone.” The community itself appears to have embraced LOQW, with many organizations invested in long-term reciprocal relationships with them such as the Monroe Senior Center and the Parks Department. These organizations rely on individuals for their help with day-to-day activities as much as LOQW relies on them for work and volunteer opportunities. This creates a natural, organic ripple effect as the more people with disabilities engage with the community, the more the community becomes aware of and supports their participation.
Organizational culture that emphasizes CLE competency
The culture of community inclusion that LOQW fosters extends to their hiring and training practices. Potential employees are expected to come on board with pre-existing community relationships that LOQW can add to their network of resources. Should the employee have no previous connections, there is an expectation that they will go out and create them. LOQW invests heavily in staff training and the staff that attend these trainings come back and disseminate what they learned to the rest of the staff. The staff at LOQW must wear many hats from employment consultant for employers to direct support professional, so it’s important that everyone share knowledge and resources. Staff are also encouraged to become specialists in one area should they have the knowledge, inclination, or opportunity (i.e. autism, housing, etc.)
Individualized supports and one-to-one staff ratios
Staff take a very individualized, one-on-one approach, discovering the interests of people they are supporting and addressing their unique needs. LOQW has a heavy emphasis on individual goal development and monitoring, making sure that staff are consistently evaluating whether services and activities further those goals. SETWORKS software keeps all staff accountable. In a place like LOQW where everyone has “boots on the ground”, having shared values and constant communication is a must to provide consistent, top-quality service.
Recently, LOQW has begun to implement a Life Course Tool framework that breaks down each individual’s day into paid supports and free time via color coding. The idea is to visually examine if there are ways to eliminate the paid support time in favor of natural supports. LOQW staff are currently working with their service coordinators on ways to increase natural supports and fade paid supports. Stakeholders at LOQW did share that sometimes fading becomes harder than expected due to the close relationships formed between individuals and their direct support professionals.
Unintended consequences
With the heavy emphasis on individualization of supports, respondents noted that they can sometimes experience limited opportunities to engage in community activities together (e,g, several individuals attending a local event like a parade together), even when requested and preferred by those individuals. A stakeholder noted the incongruity: “So I feel like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth, "Don't do group things." (but) If I want to call four of my friends and go, what's the difference?” LOQW values both individualization and choice, and strives to reflect this in the way they support relationships and community connections. This could be an important area for guidance in the organization’s newly developed CLE policy.
201 North Locust Street
P.O. Box 254
Monroe City, MO 63456
P: 573-735-4282
F: 573-735-2580
Transcen is a non-profit organization dedicated to improving educational and employment outcomes for people with disabilities. They have helped over 13,000 individuals achieve employment since 1986. They are headquartered in Rockville, MD, operate a satellite office in San Francisco, CA, and have affiliated staff based in Maryland, New Mexico, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
The San Francisco based WorkLink program is a transition and employment service that annually assists 60 job seekers with significant disabilities to achieve employment tailored to their needs and interests. Transcen has operated WorkLink since 1996.
Taking full advantage of their urban location
WorkLink’s office, which serves primarily as a meeting hub for individuals and staff to check-in before they head off to their activities, is located in the heart of San Francisco. It is accessible by multiple train and bus lines, even to those who live outside of the city. If the individual did not already come to WorkLink with working knowledge of San Francisco’s public transportation system, they are trained through WorkLink’s “Let’s Get Lost” program. This program encourages public transportation route mastery along with safe ways to ask for help when necessary. In addition, to ease traffic, the city has established public carpool lots by entrances to the Bay Bridge where drivers are encouraged to pick up and carpool with fellow travelers in exchange for reduced tolls. Some individuals who are served by WorkLink utilize this service and one person even made an individual volunteer connection through socializing with other passengers.
WorkLink is located near multiple volunteer organizations, including the community kitchen of Project Open Hand and a forest conservatory, Save the Redwoods. WorkLink’s location puts them near multiple centers of community activity from baseball games to community colleges. WorkLink uses these community resources as teaching environments for skill building. Service hours are focused on helping individuals become more involved in their communities through volunteering and classes so that the individuals understand what it means to participate and contribute to their communities and for others without IDD to be able to see these individuals as equal participants, not just recipients of services.
Using small groups to support shared interests and peer to peer connections
Due to funding limitations, the majority of WorkLink’s community life engagement supports are done in groups. But the staff believes that group models can encourage socialization and friendships among individuals in a natural way. Individuals at WorkLink see each other socially, after work, and a few even date and have romantic relationships. Opportunities for individuals at WorkLink often arise out of the interests of others. For instance, if an individual wants to learn how to knit, a staff member will seek out a community class or store that offers lessons and then post that opportunity at WorkLink’s office to see if others are interested in participating. These communal opportunities allow individuals to develop hobbies, work on job skills and their personal goals alongside friends and community members. Organizations like Project Open Hand work with 1400 volunteers a year from all over the region, so the regular volunteers from WorkLink are always working alongside new people in addition to the people they see every week. This provides a safe environment to practice communication and social interaction skills.
Peer to peer interaction is highly encouraged by WorkLink and valued by the individuals with whom they work. Staff may place more reserved individuals with outgoing peers to facilitate socialization. This interaction helps grow social skills and confidence and staff support can more easily fade. WorkLink even organizes nights out at a local bar where staff, individuals, and other patrons have gotten to know each other over the years. This familiarity and skill building also decreases the need for paid support should an individual want to go on a social outing with friends.
Braiding funds to support both employment and community life engagement
WorkLink has developed an Integrated Work Services model that combines day services along with supported employment services. While some individuals at WorkLink receive only supported employment services, others receive a hybrid of supported employment and day services. All individuals served by WorkLink have an employment goal as part of their individualized plan.
The day service at Worklink uses an hourly rate and DDS waiver funds to facilitate a person-centered process of job exploration and skill building. Once an employment goal is determined, or if the individual just wants work supports, WorkLink starts the placement process. They braid in employment services that work closely with community instructors to target employment settings where the individual would be most successful. Once placed, Worklink provide a job coach through supported employment services funded by VR. Day supports may be reduced as the individual begins working and then reduced further as individuals’ work hours increase. But for some individuals who require ongoing support, these day services function as a “wrap around” support to ensure an ongoing connection with their friends and community.
WorkLink staff see a direct link between community engagement activities and finding paid work. The individual can spend as much time needed to explore jobs and develop life skills (even earning a letter of recommendation from a volunteer site), and then can maintain opportunities for socializing and volunteering during non-work hours once a job is attained.
Work-focused values
WorkLink believes everyone should have a job and that those jobs should reflect the individual’s interests and build on their strengths. They see the community as the ideal environment to teach work and non-work skills. They use scatterplot graphs to track various goals towards community engagement and employment and also use the Positive Personal Profile assessment to better understand the individual’s dreams, challenges, and work preferences.
That value also extends to the staff they hire. WorkLink sees value in hiring individuals without prior experience in the disability field; these individuals are often open to trying new things, see the value in having high expectations, and are not entrenched in more traditional service models. They want staff who believe that people with IDD can have a life similar to theirs and will push the individual past their own expectations of what they can accomplish.
401 N. Washington Street, Suite 450
Rockville, MD 20850
(voice) 301-424-2002 (TTY) 301-217-0124
(fax) 301-251-3762
Based in Millinocket, Maine with offices in Bangor and Portland, KFI has been providing employment services as well as community and home supports for people with disabilities since 1962.
Leveraging close community connections
KFI staff recognize the importance of leveraging close community connections in a way that complements the direct supports they provide. The staff at KFI know almost everyone in the town so it is easy to connect other community members to individuals supported by KFI. Their philosophy on community inclusion is, “it’s not buildings and places, it’s people.” The staff KFI hire need to be joiners who participate in their communities. KFI not only wants the individuals they serve to be present and active in the community, they need them to be, since the near 24/7 support they provide cannot be maintained by staff alone; establishing natural supports in the community is a must. Whether that’s grocery store staff helping an individual shop, an individual working on their own in a thrift store, or church members going over to an individual’s house to eat, KFI looks for every possible way to get the most out of their small community regardless that it lacks the established infrastructures a large city provides. For example, while interviewing one individual, a community member stopped at his volunteer location just to check and see if he needed a lift home. This individual pays the community member a small monthly stipend cover her gas for his occasional lifts around town.
Reversing the typical staff ratio
In contrast to most provider ratios, KFI have teams of several staff members supporting one person. Because of this unique system they are able to offer 1 to 1 support to many individuals at once via a rotating weekly schedule where a staff spends 1 to 5 hours with one individual and then goes on to support another, sometimes in the same day. Other individuals have staff live with them at their house in revolving, 56-hour shifts. This staff flexibility allows for variation in the individual’s schedule, discourages “programming”, and maintains KFI’s “person centered thinking” ideals. Support providers actually become experts on the individual they support and are seen as his/her staff. Individuals reportedly respond well to the rotating staff (perhaps because it more authentically represents how people spend their days, with a variety of people rather than just one). The added benefits are that each staff member brings their own interests to the individual for them to explore and it makes the training and fading of staff that much easier as the one new face is still surrounded by several familiar ones who know the individual’s routine inside and out. Furthermore, transportation barriers are addressed as support providers use their own cars and are reimbursed for the miles. This allows for flexibility to mold to people’s busy schedules.
Benchmarking and ensuring high quality
To facilitate the amount of flexibility allowed staff, KFI prioritizes staff training and encourages their feedback to make sure an individual’s goals are being met and that the individual is continually afforded full choice (including the occasional bad choice) in what activities they want to do. KFI has frequent staff meetings, pre-established quarterly goals, and required benchmark reports. Goals are intentional but with a certain amount of flexibility when it comes to carrying them out on a regular basis. It’s up to the direct support professionals to modify activities to meet individual goals and interests. KFI compares themselves to Cirque Du Solei in that while the feats the people are performing may seem very impressive, there’s a whole group of people behind the scenes who you never see helping make it all run smoothly. They encourage staff to stay anonymous and behind the scenes.
Values-based
KFI has a very clear, strong, philosophical approach in everything they do, including how their supports are designed and delivered. In fact, the values are in every aspect of the organizational culture from the hiring, to training, to individualized and highly flexible supports. For KFI, Community Life Engagement is all about building experiences for people and creating opportunities for individuals to be engaged in natural settings. Their services do not involve person centered planning so much, as person-centered thinking throughout all aspects of the organization.
The organization stresses the importance of having one’s own home because the home is the place where social connections occur because you invite people over and people host you. Finally, social role valorization and the perception of competence are traits KFI stresses for all people they serve.
1024 Central Street, Suite A
Millinocket, ME 04462
Phone: (207) 723-9466
Fax: (207) 723-5099