Community Choices hosts final Balancing Act launch event

| 19 July 2024 | 26 views

Written by Xiaolin Xu, adapted from a report by Becca Obuchowski

Community Choices, based in Champaign, Illinois in the United States, became the final project partner to launch Balancing Act back in March 2024. Community Choices is the only North American project partner out of six global organizations, offering a distinctive perspective to this study.

Community Choices is a disability service organization known for its flexibility, customized approach, and strong advocacy for the people it serves. Members contribute to the development of services to ensure they are accessible and tailored to individual needs.

The launch of the project coincided with Community Choices’ annual meeting, where members were engaged with the project’s themes by discussing different types of supports. Members expressed how they valued the organization’s efforts to provide non-formal services and explore new ideas, especially those emphasizing community.

A key aspect of Community Choices is its cooperative nature, which fosters a strong sense of community and self-determination among members. The organization encourages families to connect and support each other while playing an important role in teaching life skills, helping with job opportunities, and facilitating social connections.

Members pointed out the importance of approachable staff, follow-through on promises, respectful communication, and fostering friendships in building trust with organizations and natural supports.

The Balancing Act Project adopts a participatory research approach, involving Community Choices in all parts of the project. We kicked things off with a document review from March to July 2024. Over the past few months, our research team dove into various documents from Community Choices to understand how the organization works. The document review helps us figure out what type of questions we want to ask Community Choices.

From August to September 2024, we will interview family members, their members with disabilities, and staff. These interviews will help us write a case study about how people at Community Choices use and balance natural and formal supports. These interviews will be unique in that parents will interview other parents, and self-advocates will interview other self-advocates. This way, we can get a deep understanding of participants’ experiences. Interviewers will participate in a three-day training with the team from Canada this summer.

After the interviews, we will take everything people have shared and begin to look for themes, connections, and differences between what we learn from Community Choices and the other sites around the world. This information will create a case study that shows how Community Choices functions and what types of supports are needed and used.

But that’s not all! From 2026 to 2028, we will also be back two times after the interviews are completed to get more feedback and information from Community Choices. These participatory workshops will help us understand how our research can be used to improve policies and services in the community and beyond.

We at Queen’s University are thrilled to embark on this journey with Community Choices and look forward to the valuable insights and implications that will arise from this partnership. Thank you to Becca, Hannah, and the team at Community Choices for staging this event.

School of Rehabilitation Therapy