For most parents, watching a child graduate from high school is a milestone filled with excitement about what comes next. For parents of young adults with significant intellectual and developmental disabilities, it can also be a time of uncertainty. When the school years end, many of the services and supports their children have relied on end with them.
Kristin Groves began facing that reality as her son, Joshua, approached adulthood. Now 22, Joshua is developmentally about 15 months old. He is nonverbal, wears diapers, and needs assistance with all activities of daily living.
In 2023, Kristin began searching for an adult day program where Joshua could continue learning, socializing, and being cared for after aging out of the school system. She found many programs serving adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD), but few equipped to care for people with more significant needs.
For individuals who need assistance with toileting, feeding, mobility, communication, and other daily activities, finding a program that can provide that level of care can be difficult. It also requires more individualized staff support, making these programs more expensive to operate.
Unable to find what her family needed, Kristin decided to create it herself.
Harbor Village welcomed its first clients in June 2024. Today, the nonprofit day program operates out of Kristin’s home in Allen. What started as one mother’s search for a place for her son has grown into a place where other families can bring their adult children, knowing they will be cared for, engaged, and valued.
The program is individualized. Rather than expecting every client to follow the same schedule or measure progress in the same way, the Harbor Village team looks for each person’s interests and abilities and builds from there. Activities might include music, matching colors and letters, completing puzzles, or practicing everyday skills such as doing laundry.
For Jarod, that meant building on his love of sorting and matching. When he started at Harbor Village, he could sort one color at a time. Today, he can sort eight. He went from slowly completing an eight-piece puzzle to sorting pieces from several puzzles and putting them together individually. He has even learned to put laundry into the washing machine, turn it on, and start it.
For Jarod and his family, those accomplishments show what can happen when someone takes the time to understand a person’s interests and gives them opportunities to grow.
That sense of connection extends to the families too.
Parents of adults with significant disabilities often face a level of responsibility and uncertainty that can be difficult for others to understand. Finding appropriate care is challenging enough. Finding people who understand the experience of raising a child with significant lifelong needs can be just as difficult.
Harbor Village gives families a chance to find each other.
For some parents, the program provides a few hours to work or run errands while knowing their loved one is safe and cared for. For others, it provides the chance to build relationships with families facing many of the same questions about the future.
Kristin hopes that the community will continue to grow. Her vision includes family gatherings and opportunities to bring in experts to help parents navigate issues such as financial planning, estate planning, and guardianship. They are also trying to plan for a future that may include difficult questions about who will care for their loved one when they no longer can.
“Harbor Village opens my daughter’s world up to a new and different environment and new people to come into her life as friends and caregivers,” says Ashley, a Harbor Village parent. “When she is well cared for and well loved, that trickles down to me as her mother.”
Keeping Harbor Village accessible to these families is important to Kristin. Tuition is intentionally kept low because she understands the financial strain that can come with caring for someone with significant support needs. But the cost of providing that individualized care is high, and tuition currently covers only about half of the program’s operating expenses. Donations and fundraising make up the difference.
That is one reason there is much to be thankful for at Harbor Village: the families who have found support there, the staff and volunteers who show up, and the donors who make the program possible. Their support has allowed Kristin’s vision to grow beyond her own family.
Now, the home that gave Harbor Village its beginning is also limiting how many people it can serve.
Harbor Village is working toward moving into a larger, dedicated facility where it can welcome more individuals and give families even more opportunities to connect. The move would allow the program to grow while preserving its individualized care.
Harbor Village is seeking corporate and individual sponsors to help fund its next chapter. Community members can also help by donating, volunteering, sharing its mission with others, or offering professional expertise.
For Kristin, the goal has never been to create a place for people to spend their days. It is to create a place where people with significant disabilities can continue to learn, grow, form relationships, and belong to a community. And, importantly, a place where the families who love them know they do not have to walk the journey alone.
In a month centered on thankfulness, Harbor Village offers something worth being thankful for: a place where people are known, valued, and able to belong.
For more information, to support Harbor Village, or to learn how you can become involved, visit www.Harbor-Village.org
Harbor Village opens my daughter’s world up to a new and different environment and new people to come into her life as friends and caregivers