Transcript - slide 3

How did you change the culture of your organization for parental involvement?

• Stop giving tours of in-house programs.
• Give slide shows of people working.
• Talk about people belonging to their communities.

Interviewer: How did you change the culture of your organization from facility-based to community-based related to parental involvement?

Suzanne: That is a really interesting question. The reality is that the culture had to change for everybody involved. As we began to help parents understand that community based employment was really an exceptional option for their son or daughter, we had to change the way that we looked at the organization. We quit giving tours of the in-house programs that at that time we had. When new parents came in, or when it was time for a new program plan, or when we had an organizational tour, instead of going through and showing people doing subcontract type work or being in programs that really seem like consumer home economics or those kinds of things that are adult basic education where nobody ever really leaves, we began to show slides of people working.

We began to talk in terms of belonging to and being a part of the community. We basically began to give people the impression, which has now become a reality, that community based options were really all that were available. Once we took away the visual and took away the ability for them to kind of look at a sheltered workshop setting, they were far more interested and far more willing to look at those community-based options. When asked “Do you have an adult-day-training or do you have a sheltered workshop?” When we started the answer was "Yes but, we are really trying to move people from that area into work". Today, since we do not have any segregated settings, it is very easy, we simply say "That is not what we do." In most cases the parents work with us.