Guiding Principles
Eight commitments that shape every decision we make.
We have spent considerable time studying communities like the one we want to build, Marbridge, Bittersweet Farms, First Place in Arizona, SpeciallyAble in California, and others. We have taken what works, and we have set down in writing the principles we are committed to.
These are not slogans. They are the tests we apply when we make a real decision about a site, a partner, a design choice, a family.
The eight commitments
🧭 1. Start with the person
We begin from a belief the field calls person-centered: every person has value, voice, purpose, and potential, including those who do not speak and who need support in nearly everything. So we build the supports around the individual, what brings them to life and what matters most to them, rather than around a facility's routine. Each adult helps direct their own plan and their own day, alongside the people who know them best, and is supported to take up a real, valued role in community life. This project intends to comply with person-centered planning (14 NYCRR 636-1.2) and HCBS settings rules (14 NYCRR 636-2 / 42 CFR 441.301(c)(4)-(5)). That is our duty. It is not an OPWDD or CMS approval of the village.
🏘️ 2. Live together, parents and adult children
Some families want to live nearby, and we hope that remains possible. Housing and HCBS are not conditioned on a parent remaining, or on a village rulebook. Each adult chooses their setting. The circle of support is chosen by the individual, except where law confers authority (14 NYCRR 636-1.2). Paid support people are hired by the adult or their legally authorized representative, not by a village program.
🌅 3. Designed to live beyond parents’ lifetime
Every parent of a child with profound disabilities lives with the same fear: what happens to my child when I am gone? Continuity is a design goal, not a promise that no one is displaced or that anyone has a legal right to a particular home. The adult can leave and choose another setting. OPWDD and the CCO authorize services, not the village. Families may buy respite from existing authorized providers. If the project later applies to become an authorized provider, we will say so then (14 NYCRR 619.3). Neighbor families may watch out for one another. A foundation, if we build one, is meant to outlast the founders.
🏡 4. Choose domestic scale over institutional scale
A hamlet, not a facility. We are building small homes around a small commons, on a property where everyone can walk to everyone else. No long corridors, no dorm energy, no fluorescent lights. The non-certified path means housing, staff, and services stay truly separate. Housing should be held so the adult (or an SNT or family) leases or owns, without a service provider owning, leasing, managing, or having a financial relationship with the landlord (14 NYCRR 636-2.3(j)). It is not an OPWDD-operated or certified residence unless and until it holds an operating certificate. Domestic scale is not a nicety, it is a requirement for dignity, sensory regulation, and a sense of home.
🤲 5. Watch out for one another
Founding families remain present and watchful. This is not a feature for marketing; it is a structural safeguard against the neglect and abuse that isolated residents can suffer. When several families are bound together by the same stake in the community's wellbeing, the eyes that matter most stay open. Watchfulness cuts both ways, though, and we would rather say so than pretend it is free. These are adults' homes. Being known by your neighbors is not the same as being watched by them, and part of the work ahead is agreeing together, with the residents and the people who support them, what stays inside a household and what the rest of us are right to notice.
🌿 6. Design around the senses
Developmental disabilities vary, and the spaces have to accommodate variation. Calm materials. Soft acoustics. Defensible quiet rooms. But also natural sunlight, active common space, and the texture of real life. The aim is sensory-considered, not sensory-deprived.
🌳 7. Stay open to the wider community
Not a compound. The driveway is visible from the road. The village integrates with the surrounding hamlet, not apart from it. Family members come and go; neighbors are welcomed; the model invites encounter rather than seclusion. Isolation is part of the problem we are solving, we will not reproduce it in our own design.
♻️ 8. Build to be replicated
Our name reflects the longer aim. The model is being documented as it develops so that other families can adopt it. We are not building one community; we are building a working template other parents can take to their own places. The goal is not exclusivity. The goal is to make this kind of community available to more families than just our own.
With gratitude
We are grateful to the families and communities who have built places like this before us. We owe a particular debt to SpeciallyAble in California, whose multi-generational, family-centered model helped shape our thinking.
It takes a village to raise a child, and even more so to keep that child safe, known, and held into adulthood.
What this means in practice. A decision is consistent with our principles if it lets parents stay close to their adult children, keeps the scale domestic, protects residents from isolation, and brings us closer to a model others can reuse. A decision that compromises any of those will be a hard conversation among the founding families.