Costs and Outcomes of Community Services for People with Intellectual Disabilities

The first research post of David Felce, Ph.D., was at the University of Southampton from 1973 through 1986, where he conducted research on the quality of residential services for people with mental retardation requiring extensive or pervasive support or other developmental disabilities, with a small excursion into the quality of residential accommodations for older adults with mental infirmities or who were physically frail. After 3 years as Director of the British Institute of Mental Handicap, he was appointed to his current post at the University of Wales College of Medicine. He maintains research interests in the measurement of quality of life, the determinants of quality in community housing services, the analysis and amelioration of challenging behavior, and service development generally in the field of intellectual disabilities. He is a co-editor of Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities and serves on the editorial boards of seven other intellectual disability journals. In addition, he is a member of the council of the International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual Disabilities.

Amy S. Hewitt has an extensive background and work history in the field of developmental disabilities and has worked in various positions over the past 23 years, including as a residential Program Director and Director of Training. She is currently Research Associate and Director of Interdisciplinary Training at the University of Minnesota, Institute on Community Integration, where she directs several federal and state research, evaluation, and demonstration projects in the areas of direct support professional (DSP) workforce development and community human services for people with disabilities. Dr. Hewitt is a national leader in the are of workforce development and community supports for individuals with developmental disabilities. Dr. Hewitt's current projects include the College of Directs Support, a national training curriculum development projects that currently offers training to more than 100,000 DSPs throughout the United States; Mobilizing for Change, an Administration on Developmental Disabilities field-initiated project to develop an on-line training curriculum for frontline supervisors (College of Frontline Supervision); Removing the Revolving Door, a national project to develop and implement a train-the-trainer technical assistance model in five states to teach other how to effectively work with organizations to reduce DSP turnover and vacancy rates; Kansa Mobilizing for Workforce Change, a systems change project to improve retention and recruitment of the DSPs in community human services organizations; and The Illinois Comprehensive Workforce Development Initiative to Achieve Improved Individual Outcomes for Citizens with Intellectual and Development Disabilities, a statewide systems change project to reduce direct support professional turnover. Dr. Hewitt has authored and co-authored many curricula, journal articles, and manuscripts. She is a managing editor of Frontline Initiative, a national newsletter for DSPs; a contributing editor for LINKS, a newsletter of ANCOR; and guest editor of Mental Retardation, a journal of the American Association on Mental Retardation (AAMR). She is currently a board member for Arc Hennepin-Carver and for Friendship Ventures. She is a founding member and past Co-Chair of the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals and a past board member of the AAMR.

David R. Johnson, Ph.D., is Professor and Director of the Institute on Community Integration at the College of Education and Human Development, University of Minnesota.

K. Charlie Lakin, Ph.D., is Director of the Rehabilitation Research and Training Center (RRTC) on Community Living at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Dr. Lakin has more than 25 years of experience in providing services to individuals with intellectual and developmental disa