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Other Ways to Help

How Community Plays Out in our Programs

Our Community Schools Prevention Program

is a partnership with New York City and an example of a program intended to lift the individual child and an organization that is so central to the health of community. It takes head on the environment of under-resourced schools in under-resourced communities. It’s early intervention for the student and the wider community to transform elementary education for both. Our aim is to see if we can change the course of outcomes in dramatically under-resourced school districts, where children and their families simply can’t see their way at present, to creating a strong educational foundation towards a promising future.

Our "Family Assessment and Community Enhancement" (FACE)

Program is another example of bringing tangible benefit to the individual and the community at once. FACE is an aggressive early intervention on behalf of children to help them avoid the foster care system in the first place. Outcomes data are striking on the pathway through foster care vs. a more intimate original family setting. The data point not only to near term savings for taxpayers and stability for the child, the difference in these two paths are stark in the welfare and productivity of the individual, to the benefit of self and community.

Our expanding "Health Home" practice

is another example of bringing simultaneous benefit to the individual and the community. Lack of synch among caregivers is something we are all familiar with. It is wasteful of time and resources and can often lead to suboptimal care. So too, with our children and adults with complex needs. A disparate group of well-intended professionals simply can’t deliver the same degree of effective, efficient and progressing care as a “home health” team that is tightly unified around the whole child or adult. Early outcomes data support this strategy of care and that is why Abbott House is investing to expand this practice to make it standard of care.

Our Adult Program

The overarching objective in our work with adults with complex needs is to put them in a position to make increasingly meaningful contributions to their environment – in their homes and in their communities.

A Sense of Place & Home

Living among family, friends and neighbors in small intimate settings fosters the acquisition of skills that enable them to make contributions to others. Comparative outcomes data for institutional settings vs. small community homes makes clear that institutions create holding patterns and home settings in communities create the possibility of futures. That’s why our adult program focuses on:

  • Working with families with adult children with complex needs so they might acquire the skills to keep the family unit together or
  • To place adults with complex needs in intimate home settings with peers who become ‘family’ and professional caregivers. Both of these avenues create a durable foundation of home and family critical to personal growth and the capacity to contribute to their homes and communities.

A Range of Contributions to Others

Our work considers the nature of contribution to home and community as well. For some, the acquisition of prevocational skills to raise their personal independence might be our ultimate aim. For others, more direct participation in community life through recreation, volunteerism or employment, may be the developmental goal.

  • Our children, adolescents and adults have lost their sense of place in the world.

Their notion of a future is stalled somewhere in the present.  We see this as a tragedy of inertia and unfulfilled promise, and a burden and loss of an asset to the community.  The trust of all of our work is to help them create a durable and promising sense of their future, for their sake and the sake of the communities in which they live.

  • In turn, our foundational work with children, families and adults with disabilities depends on the consideration and investment of people like you.
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