Our Services
Pathways To Independence can provide Community advocacy for young adults with intellectual/developmental disabilities(IDD). This involves giving these individuals equal access to community resources, services, and opportunities, promoting their rights, and full participation in society by advocating for policy changes, raising awareness, and supporting self-advocacy efforts within the local community at large. This will also involve actively working to ensure the individual’s ability to live, recreate and work within the local community.
This includes assisting with daily activities, promoting programs to empower the individual’s ability to be an integral part of their community living and having relationships with their friends and family. Assisting these individuals to develop social capital along with socializing within the local community. This also involves assisting them to develop interests and involvement in volunteering at local community businesses. All of these areas can be assisted and supported by Pathways To Independence. There are many pathways to independence for individuals with IDD.
We promote skills and activities which empower the individual to seek their dreams and desires to live a good life within their community.
Community Advocacy
A collection of tools and approaches based upon a set of shared values that can be used to plan with a person-not for them. These tools can be used to help the person think about what is important in their lives now and to think about what would make a good future. Planning should build the person’s circle of support and involve all the people who are important to that person’s life.
Person Centered Planning was developed as a way of enabling people – children and adults – to move out of special segregated places schools, hospital and institutions into mainstream life – schools and communities
Person Centered Process
Transition Planning should take place with students with mild and moderate disabilities at the age of 14 while they are in a high school program. A Transition is a program for mild and moderate disabled students at the ages of 18-21. It should include the following learning domains: 1) Functional Academics, 2)Home And Independent Living Skills, 3)Prevocational/Vocational Skills, 4)Recreational/Leisure-Time Skills, and 5)Community Experiences. Most Transition Programs will vary in goals and objectives but a Best Practice program must have certain elements within the total program.
Transition Program
Adaptive Behavior Assessment System
The Adaptive Behavior Assessment System – Third Edition (ABAS – 3)is a comprehensive norm-referenced assessment of adaptive skills needed to effectively and independently care for oneself, respond to others, and meet environmental demands at home, work and community. It measures skills that are important in everyday life.
The need to communicate ; to display social skills;to function effectively at home and in the community; to engage in leisure and work and to care for personal health and safety. A primary purpose of the ABAS-3 is to comprehensively, validly, and reliably describe the degree to which people display the adaptive behavioral skills needed in their environment.
The AVAS-3 identifies an individual’s strengths and limitations and allows professionals to plan, implement, and monitor interventions. It is used to improve an individual’s adaptive skills in daily functioning .
Social Capital is a concept where individuals and groups gain benefits and find solutions to issues through their social networks. It is an interconnected network of interpersonal relationships that gains and transfers benefits and resources by encouraging social ties and participation. It is the social networks of relations: a shared sense of identity, a shared understanding, shared values, trust, cooperation, and reciprocity.
Social relationships are resources that can lead to the development and accumulation of human capital. It is the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized.
Social capital is a set of shared values that allows individuals or group effectively achieve a common purpose. It is a concept that recognizes that people’s relationships and social networks are an important aspect of a person’s health and quality of life. In fact, social capita has been shown to improve people’s physical and mental health outcomes.
Social Capital
Pathways to Independence (PTI) supports individuals with developmental disabilities and their families in becoming active members of their communities. Community integration means full participation in all aspects of life—work, education, recreation, and social relationships—on an equal level with neurotypical individuals.
Historically, people with developmental disabilities were often segregated. Over the past two decades, the focus has shifted toward inclusion, emphasizing abilities rather than limitations. Effective integration requires access to areas such as employment, healthcare, housing, recreation, religion, relationships, and more.
This should span an individual’s entire life and reflect their interests and developmental stage, guided by person-centered planning and life course charting. Barriers to integration include severity of disability, inaccessible environments, lack of assistive technology, cultural attitudes, and inadequate services. PTI works to address these factors.