Visitors and Guests

OCL Visitors and Guests

A group from Prescott Russell traveled from Canada, with Michael Kendrick, to meet with us at OCL. They were most interested in organizational change both from a residential and vocational perspective and were intrigued with the personalized support that we provide. Giland, Kelly, Caroline, Norman, and Louise met with the OCL staff Philip, Richard, Pat, Heather, Lori, Lauren, Katherine and Geri. We spent time together talking broadly about the evolution of personalized supports and then each of the visitors then traveled to either a household to meet a person that we support along with their community housemate, or to meet someone at their place of employment. There was a lot of bubbling about the endless possibilities that they could see when they all arrived back at the office for a final discussion before they traveled on. It was a nice blending of minds, spirits and personalities that made the day wonderful in many ways. We hope to keep them as our friends to the north, as we all work towards better options to the people who look to us for support.

We had the privilege of having Tony McLean visit with us from New Zealand the week of June 20th following his participation in a seven day event on Moral Coherency lead by Wolf Wolfensberger and Susan Thomas. Tony was very interested in learning more about how non paid people could be instrumental in the lives of those supported. He was intrigued with many of the life sharing arrangements through OCL that are now at the ten year anniversary. He met with three separate households to spend time with people and to experience how they lived. He found it remarkable the level of support that some needed and the deep commitment from individual people in life sharing roles to take on what many others would see as unusual. Steve Smits, the CNYDSO Director also met with Tony and quoted, “It often takes extraordinary people to do the ordinary.” Tony also met with Pam Walker and Bonnie Shultz from the Center on Human Policy at Syracuse University and visited with Frank Woolheater and many others from the L’Arche Community. Tony’s visit with us helped to deepen our understanding of the work we struggle to accomplish with those we support.

We had the good fortune to have ABE, Koki & Aiko come from Japan to visit with us. Tricia Evarts, Philip Shaer, Richard Prue and Patricia Fratangelo spent the afternoon speaking with this couple with Maho Kasahara, an interpreter from Syracuse University. They were visiting our country to learn more about how services are developed. They seemed very intrigued with what OCL does at this time in helping those we support to live with typical community members in life sharing roles. They had never heard of this before and thought it would be a nice idea for their daughter. Their daughter is a wonderful artist. The website for her work is http://umi.or.jp

Susan Perlik, Ph.D Executive Director of Keshet in Northbrook, Illinois spent time with us on May 10th. Susan is involved with an agency that serves children with special needs. Now that many of the children are growing up, she is exploring alternate ways to the traditional group based services. She had read our book, One Person at a Time and came to explore with us more about our work with both personalized residential and vocational services. She met with Philip Shaer, Pat Fratangelo, Cheryl Kantak, Paulette Deroisiers, Richard Prue, Ingrid Much, Debbie DiGiacomo, Dolores Spadatto and Brian Barney who represented our families and board, along with our adiminstrative, residential, vocational and service coordination teams.