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Welcome!

Welcome to the Companion Resources Home Page! Our goal is to help ordinary people to meet the extraordinary challenges of living with a disability or relating to persons with disabilities.

Companion Resources is built on three key concepts:

• Companionship
• Community
• Resources

  

Companionship

Persons with special needs experience most relationships as a client or patient with a professional person relating to them. Relationships of companionship, on the other hand, focus on mutuality. By learning to know each other as friends, we are able to learn from each other and help each other. The person with special needs feels safe and valued in the relationship and the person with more abilities is also able to learn and grow through the relationship by calling forth and naming the unique gifts in the other person.

Companionship is particularly important in dealing with persons with developmental disabilities and with mental illness. In addition, under the larger disabilities umbrella, Companion Resources offers more specialized information on autism and fragile X syndrome. Other specific issues may be added in the future.

In relating to anyone with special needs, we have found that the model of Gentle Teaching offers a more consistent and humane approach than the standard behavioral modification models.

Community

More people today are making an effort to include persons with special needs into the larger community. However, "community inclusion" is more than just putting persons in need into settings that are more "normal." Community happens when companions build bridges from persons with special needs to other persons. Communities can be large or small, but true community means that all persons feel included and valued for whatever contribution or role they play in the life of the group.

Companions can learn much from community development models that start with the people instead of structures and institutions. The asset-based approach is particularly helpful because it consciously works at including persons who might not naturally be included in community life.

There are an increasing number of models of community life that start with building community around persons with disabilities and mental illness and then extend that community life toward the larger geographical community surrounding them.

Resources

Families and companions build bridges from persons with special needs to the communities to which they belong. Often this effort requires specialized resources. Information is important so that companions can understand the special needs and communicate them clearly to others who relate to the person. Resources of support and encouragement are also helpful from persons who understand firsthand the challenges of a particular special need. Today's technology puts a wealth of information at our fingertips. The telephone and computer also enable us to build new kinds of communities (sometimes called "virtual communities") of specialized support to supplement our face-to-face communities.

Specific annotated links are offered on the following topics (more may be added in the future):

• Disabilities (focus on developmental disabilities)
• Autism
• Fragile X Syndrome
• Mental Illness
• Life Planning (includes financial planning)
• Vocational Options
• Residential Options
• Adaptations

The Internet is a wealth of information on many more topics. For general health concerns and links to other specific health conditions, Companion Resources sorts out some of the best of the multitude of resources for healthy living. In addition, we offer general helps for using the Internet that have been particularly useful to locate even more information.