This commentary was written by Elizabeth Campbell, a Developmental Disabilities Housing Initiative founding parent from Shelburne.
Like every other Vermont parent who has an adult son or daughter whose intellectual/developmental disabilities significantly limit their ability to express, protect and care for themselves, I was horrified to read the recent VTDigger article, which describes the sadistic and cruel treatment of two adults with developmental disabilities by their shared living providers.
Most Vermonters are surprised to learn that for the last 30 years, Vermont has routinely placed adults like my son in adult foster care (called shared living) when their parents are no longer able to care for them at home.
Placing someone as vulnerable as my son in adult foster care/shared living is like placing your elderly parent with significant dementia in adult foster care, where they’d be a guest in a series of strangers’ homes, with minimal quality-care oversight. Most people would agree that this is not a good idea, which is why 85 parents like me, with adult sons and daughters like mine, have banded together to form the grassroots, parent-led Developmental Disabilities Housing Initiative.
Our goal is to raise awareness of state practice that potentially puts the most vulnerable adult Vermonters at risk for the nightmare scenario described in VTDigger’s article, and to provide our life-long vulnerable adult sons and daughters with a safe and stable place to live and friends to live with, long after we, their parents, are gone. While we recently successfully advocated for legislation that opens the door to developing housing options in addition to adult foster care/shared living, parents can’t do this alone.
We need the designated and special services agencies, housing finance organizations and housing authorities to partner with us to develop the kinds of safe, stable, service-supported housing models that exist in many other states.
Together, we can do better.