Adults With Developmental Disabilities

My SNAP Curriculum is now being used by agencies in 46 states (and 3 other countries). Only missing Hawaii, Pennsylvania, Vermont and New Hampshire. It is extremely satisfying to me that so many people across the country (and world) are actively looking for ways to improve their service to adults with developmental disabilities.

It is so easy to slip into the trap of just providing a "sitting service" to the people we support and forgetting why we are there. This is a hard job. It isn't like we see leaps and bounds of improvement in our clients, and we are not going to "cure" anybody of anything.You work with the same clients day after day, not seeing outright improvement, and it's easy to mentally give up. But my resource book sales are telling me that there are many agencies who are not giving up! Good for you.

The curriculum is a tool for staff to use to engage adults with developmental disabilities in a conversation/discussion of a wide variety of daily living topics. It's difficult to think about the things that we take for granted... that's why we take them for granted. It's especially hard for brand new staff to know what issues our clients face on a daily basis and then have a clue how to start a conversation about the topic with a person who might not learn the same way we do.