Growing to Meet Emerging Need
Triangle will add three houses over the next five years while enhancing supports for longtime residents.
Next up in our series about Triangle’s comprehensive Five-Year Strategic Plan is a deeper dive on the exciting goals for our Residential Services. Triangle currently operates nine houses in Metro North and North Shore communities that provide loving and engaging homes for 43 residents. Some of these houses have groups of roommates who are essentially family after living together for decades. Each house is special in that there are strong bonds between housemates, families, and the staff members who have been a part of the fabric of these homes for many years. The high-end services we currently provide will only get better as part of our plans for the future.
When considering how to grow our Residential Services operations, our strategic planning collaborators at Community Action Partners did a thorough and thoughtful analysis of the current residential service landscape and interviewed state funding partners to learn more about their forecasted need for disability-specific housing in the coming years. Their findings highlighted how service providers will need to modify their traditional models. As younger people age into eligibility for housing, there will be a significant number of individuals who will have heightened needs related to behavioral health.
This came as no surprise to Triangle, based upon recent referrals over the past five years which necessitated the conversion of some of our homes to what the Department of Developmental Services refers to as an “intermediate” model. With these conversions came an enhanced investment in our clinical supports team, a commitment to positive behavioral supports, and boosted levels of the professional development and training programs for our Residential Services staff team. Because of the success of these previous conversions and Triangle’s deep investment in clinical services, Community Action Partners recommended that we add three new intermediate homes that can provide services to 12 new residents.
This ambitious growth goal will also be an opportunity to address the acute needs of many of our aging residents. Many of Triangle’s current homes are multi-level, urban houses that are not ideally suited for people with mobility challenges. We are eagerly looking for new homes in our service area that would be ideal for this population. After relocating some of our most tenured residents, this would then allow us to convert the vacated homes into new homes aligned with our growth plan.
Much like the EPIC and Day Services goals described earlier this month, the plans for our Residential Services program are not so much to change our approach at the expense of current programs. Rather, goals for new homes will be built to leverage our current organizational assets, in-house expertise, and commitment to staff development. And, most importantly, these goals will boost the quality of life for the people we are already honored to have as residents in our homes.
Do you want to support the 2,000 people we serve each year while investing in our plan to reach another 1,000 people with disabilities in the next five years? Consider investing in our current services and our future growth with a gift to our end of year fundraising efforts by clicking here.