What is it about?
If we really believe in community integration for people with disabilities, what can we do to help make it happen? This article presents the development of an application to help us build unique communities for each individual. We track information on the people we serve, community events and contacts, and then use creative ways to connect people as they take their chosen place in the community.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
The Community Connections Manager is a tool we can use to help people connect, but also measure our effectiveness in the effort. Our hope is to build this tool into a phone based app that will help individuals, families, and providers build connections in the community that can really make a difference.
Perspectives
For the past 50 years our agency has built some very effective programs to serve people with disabilities. We're proud of those accomplishments, but the future calls for something very different; a place where every individual we serve has a unique experience based on their desires and talents. This application represents much more than just another computer tool for our staff to use. Instead, it is the start of a system redesign, using our staff in new and innovative ways to help each individual create a community that is uniquely their own. This is an exciting time, but it will require us to think in dramatically different ways in order to make community building a reality.
Ray Schmidt
Fairfield County Board of DD
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Community connections: Moving from a culture of caregiving to community building, Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, May 2016, IOS Press,
DOI: 10.3233/jvr-160797.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
