NONPROFIT SPOTLIGHT: AIM Services
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“It's not enough to invite somebody to your table. You have to believe they belong there.”
“Kids with disabilities grow up to be adults with disabilities” – this is a refrain frequently reiterated within my family as we navigate what it means to support my 28-year-old brother with profound autism. While much attention, awareness, and support is placed on children and teens with developmental disabilities, it can be challenging to find resources once an individual has aged out of the system of state-mandated, school-provided supports at age 21.
For many, it’s jarring to exit from a routine of school and transition programs with teachers, therapists, paraprofessionals, and more folks that they are comfortable and familiar with. Oftentimes, the path forward is unclear and anxiety-inducing for families and individuals alike. This is where AIM Services—based in Saratoga Springs—comes in, working with individuals with disabilities to support them in finding meaningful work, living arrangements, connections and, most importantly, purpose.
While AIM provides services to individuals with disabilities of all ages, as well as people over the age of 18 diagnosed with a Traumatic Brain Injury, my conversation with CEO Chris Lyons centered around AIM’s work alongside adults with developmental disabilities. Prior to joining AIM as the CEO, Chris worked as a trial attorney with a national practice that focused on defending providers, agencies, and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities in cases that involve their living independently in the community. When Geraldo Rivera broke the story on Willowbrook State School with his 1972 exposé, a shift began away from the institutionalization movement and towards supporting individuals with disabilities within their communities, rather than removing them. AIM was established in 1979 as part of this movement.
For the last 13 years, Chris has been helping AIM “shift the paradigm of service delivery from a control model to a support model,” he says. “[In] the old system of support, which we used to call the ‘circle of support,’ we called people with developmental disabilities, ‘patients’ or ‘clients’ or ‘consumers,’ but today we call them individuals. We call them whatever their name is! Instead of evaluating someone based on their IQ or their chart, we actually listen to people with our common sense, professionalism, and heart to see who they are.”
In AIM’s work, rather than creating a circle outside of the individual, with arrows pointing inwards from doctors, residences, the state, or behaviorists telling them what to do, the arrows are coming outward from the individuals themselves in order to direct their own futures. One of AIM’s mantras is the “power of potential,” which is exactly how they approach each individual they work with. The questions become, “Who do you want to become with the quality of life that you can live? What do you want to be competent at? Who do you want to live with? How do you express yourself spiritually? How do you express yourself sexually? What kind of relationships do you want to have? What do you want to learn? What kind of experiences do you want to try? What risks do you want to take so that you learn from the natural consequences of your choices and, like all of us, you grow as a unique human being?” Chris says.
These conversations happen over years and lifetimes, supporting individuals as they continue to age and evolve. As service providers, AIM offers a wide range of tangible paths towards those goals – three different pathways towards employment options under the Office of Persons With Developmental Disabilities (OPWDD), opportunities to increase involvement in and engagement with the community through Self-Direction, a bridge to living independently with supervised and supportive residences as well as their family care homes, Day Habilitation, and more. Within all of these settings, AIM is committed to letting the individual guide the way and supporting them through the ups and downs.
“We give that person agency over their life. We don’t substitute our judgment for them,” Chris says. “They want to do things like go on dates, have relationships, have a better than minimum wage job – all of these things are, in some people's eyes, fraught with problems because they may be hurt or stigmatized. We support the natural consequences of those choices, we don't coerce people. People with challenges are far more capable of accepting responsibility for the choices that we give them credit for, and they don't want us to strip them of the dignity of risk.”
When explaining that dignity of risk, Chris spoke about a particularly memorable individual, John, who is still with AIM today. Roughly 10 years ago, John had asked for help getting involved in taekwondo. Despite the fact that he has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair, he was all in when they found a sensei in South Glens Falls who would take him into his classes. So was the sensei. Chris recounts the conversation, recalling that the sensei said, “‘I’ll teach him to move his wheelchair like his legs. He'll be in a [typical beginner’s] class with natural support.’ He was with neurotypical people that were just starting out in taekwondo, people from the community. 75% of the people who live in a certified group home report that their closest relationship is with someone who's paid to have it with them,” he compares. Today, John has earned his black belt in taekwondo, in addition to moving out of his 12-person group home and into an apartment that he helped design and renovate.
The point of AIM, however, is not to leave you compartmentalizing these success stories into a separate file of wins for individuals with disabilities. Rather, the point is to ask what you can do to support these folks and welcome them into your life and your community. When asked about how to best do this, Chris told me, “I would ask everybody to do a little soul-searching about how they view people that are different. If you connect in a meaningful way, you not only add value to a relationship with someone with a challenge, but you allow them to add value with you. That's the key. People don't want to just be in the community, driving around, doing things like, ‘Isn't it great they're allowed in the movie theater?’ They want to be of their community. They want to talk about the movie with people afterwards. It's not enough to invite somebody to your table. You have to believe they belong there.”
For more information, visit www.aimservicesinc.org
