For decades, success in services for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities has often been measured in ways that feel neat on paper. How many goals were completed. How many behaviors were reduced. How many tasks were mastered independently. How...
For decades, IDD day programs have often been built around a simple goal: supervision and routine. While structure and safety are important, families and providers alike are beginning to ask a much bigger question, what if day programs could become places where people...
There is a quiet kind of magic in celebrating small milestones. It does not always look dramatic from the outside. Sometimes it is a person making eye contact during a group conversation for the first time. Sometimes it is someone tolerating a crowded room for ten...
Walk into a crowded room, voices overlapping, fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, chairs scraping against the floor. For many, it’s just background noise. But for some adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, that same environment can feel...
Non-verbal communication includes the ways we convey messages without words — through facial expressions, body language, gestures, and eye contact. Interpreting non-verbal cues typically comes naturally to most people; however, for individuals with autism, these...
When Matthew was seven years old, he received a final diagnosis that confirmed what we already knew. He had been living in a world where his gestures and verbal exclamations were neurologically motivated and although his school labeled him as difficult, a diagnosis of...
For many individuals, life can be daunting and challenging as we navigate a world that has become increasingly complex. For many of us that do not have severe challenges in expressive or receptive language skills or in cognitive processing, the world can still feel...
As we live in a world increasingly supported by technology and new innovations, it can seem dauting and overwhelming to grasp all the fundamental changes that are occurring at such a rapid pace. When first introduced to the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI), I...
In my former life I was a director at a large non-profit organization that served individuals with intellectual and physical disabilities. I arrived one Wednesday morning to find a voice mail from one of my program supervisors informing me that “Mrs. Harris was going...
