http://www.c-q-l.org/resource-library/resource-library/all-resources/relationships--intimacy

Liz Weintraub, CQL Quality Enhancement Specialist, discusses relationships in the lives of people with disabilities. Liz provides insight into the importance of building relationships, what they mean for quality of life and barriers to establishing connections with others.

TRANSCRIPT: 

I also think that driving is really hard for people. For example, I have friends who live in Baltimore, and Baltimore is an hour from, about forty five minutes to an hour away from here. And I never get to see them and just because I don’t drive. And so therefore it’s a huge effort to even see them. 

I’ll give you an example about that. On Saturday, and we obviously couldn’t go because of the snow, but we were invited to our friend’s birthday party. We would have had to take the metro, to get to the train station, to get to Baltimore, and then take a cab or whatever we do to get to her house. So there’s a lot of steps between here and there. And it’s not just, “I want to see Mary and I’ll jump in the car to see her,” but you need to plan it out.


Liz Weintraub: Barriers In Transportation

Liz Weintraub, CQL Quality Enhancement Specialist, discusses relationships in the lives of people with disabilities. Liz provides insight into the importance of building relationships, what they mean for quality of life and barriers to establishing connections with others.

TRANSCRIPT:

We live in a society where it’s natural to have friends. Most people, and I say most, because there are some people, they like to be alone, they enjoy being alone, but that’s not me. And that’s not a lot of my friends.

Most people that I know of, where it’s natural to have friends, and therefore I think it’s important to have friends to do things with, to talk to, to be with.

Liz Weintraub: Importance Of Friendship

TRANSCRIPT:
The more people with and without disabilities do training, the more other people see that as role-modeling. And then they may also want to try that and to include people with disabilities in their training and a person without a disability and then there they could also then form some peer support groups or get that peer support from them because they’re doing that training together. You can do both, but if you don’t have a self-advocacy group that’s another great way to do that – is to give those opportunities to people they serve in their agency – A chance to do some training with them and to do some role-plays with them, and different opportunities to speak out.

Tia Nelis: Promoting Peer Support

TRANSCRIPT:

One of the things we do, is we do a meeting and we talk about rights and responsibilities about saying “what kind of rights do you think you have?” We’ll go over a list with people, we’ll come up with things and we’ll write them down and then we’ll do responsibility for each of those things. And sometimes people will just keep saying “I have the right for that” and do it in a more aggressive way and demand it, you know, expressing it in way that, yes you have that right, but you also have to be respectful and responsible for those things that happen. So sometimes people do role-plays, they’ll do group sessions, or different things like that to help people understand.  

Tia Nelis: Teaching Responsibility

Dori Leslie of CHI Friendship discusses the value of CQL Certification, and how it will benefit all staff throughout an organization.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Ryan and I will be able to support the organization to increase our Personal Outcome Measures® awareness, diving deep into each question surrounding each of those POMs. We’ll be able to make sure that CQL stays at the forefront of our services, when it comes to each person we support paralleling to the POMs. Ryan and I are planning on doing some Personal Outcome Measures® education to different groups throughout Friendship. We’ll be able to teach our direct support staff on increased knowledge about outcomes. 

Ryan and I will be able to support all of the QDDPs that complete the outcome interviews to really understand the questions that go with each outcome and just dig a little bit deeper into making sure that everybody has as much presence in their life as possible for the supports, and help them to have their outcomes be present as well in their lives. We’ll be able to help maintenance, finance, secretaries, administration – take their services to the next level. What do they do each day for their job duties, and tie it back to the people we support using Personal Outcome Measures®. 

So Ryan and I will be able to enhance the whole organization’s knowledge of Personal Outcome Measures®.

CQL Certification: Enhancing POMs Knowledge

Jeff Pederson of CHI Friendship discusses the role that certification and CQL plays in continuous learning for human service organizations.

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TRANSCRIPT:

We did introduce the whole process of what took place in our general staff meetings, with all of our staff, so they have a high level of what transpired through those two weeks and then we’ll take it back and continue to build upon each specific department’s needs. I see it really aiding us too in our strategic planning. Where do we need to put the resources? What are the top priority outcomes for people we support? So all that data, and the reliability of it, will help us in the future with that strategic planning aspect.

If you truly want to be a continuous learning organization, you need to open yourself to future exploration and educational opportunities that CQL provides, to get a better understanding – of what each person really wants, what really they need, how we can help improve their quality of life. If you’re an organization that thinks, “well I have that pretty well down, I don’t need to learn anything anymore – I think that’s … you become stagnant, and services will actually decrease.”

I’d like to re-emphasize our belief in the partnership we have with CQL. CQL wants the same thing we want - what’s best for people. I think the partnership is alive and strong and we’re excited about how we can continue to work together.


CQL Certification: Continuous Learning

CQL provides training, accreditation and customized consultation to human service organizations and systems that share our vision of dignity, opportunity and community for all people.  www.c-q-l.org