Habilitation 2.0
Habilitation 2.0
Aaron Blocher-Rubin, Founder & CEO
Recently I’ve had the privilege of sending a few emails that I’ve dreamed of for a long time, to announce some changes we are making to improve our Habilitation program, for both families and employees. This new approach has been a long time coming—10 years, in fact. Habilitation has always been our largest program, but also the most difficult to optimize. To understand how we’ve arrived at where we are, I think it’s worthwhile to reflect on how we got here.
The Early Days
I’ll never forget the first person I interviewed. It was early 2006, and we finally had an office. Tucked in a corner of the Mercado building in the town of Guadalupe, I sat eagerly at my recently donated desk as I awaited her arrival. It was a big milestone—the first person to respond to a job advertisement, for this new organization I was so excited about, that no one had ever heard of. I had big dreams for AZA United. Huge. Here in my office of one.
She was an ASU student majoring in general education, looking for experience with autism. She was bright enough to realize she would likely have students on the spectrum in her classroom at some point. Immediately I could tell she’d be a great employee. I’d never ran a business before, but I’d worked with hundreds of kids and therapists. All I cared about was if she’d be good with kids.
But as she walked into the office, she must have had some doubts. Here she sees this guy who’s barely older than her, all by himself in this pseudo-office scarcely decorated with non-matching paint jobs and what looks like leftover garage junk (I failed Interior Decorating 101). There’s a mop bucket in the corner, which he explains is used when it rains because the roof leaks. He’s talking about this amazing job opportunity, and all excited because she’s the first person to ever apply. I can’t say I would have been so forgiving! But she was a great sport and took me at my word that, despite what it looked like, this was not a pathetic little wannabe company that might run out of cash and skip town next month. It was the start of something great.
She accepted the job, and I immediately matched her with a family I knew. I told her I’d meet her at the home and help her get started. This was the moment I’d been waiting for. The opportunity to start AZA United was so appealing to me because I saw how much room for improvement there was in the world of Habilitation agencies. Now was my chance to prove that I could do better. My years of working with kids, training at the Lovaas Institute, helping transform SARC into SARRC…it was all ready to be tested. Could I empower a new Habilitator with no experience to become a dynamic, high-performing interventionist, with so few resources and so little time?
I remember that visit so clearly. We were introduced to a little guy who was so excited about life, but very hard to interact with. I knew I didn’t have time to train our first new hire on the principles of ABA, or a curriculum-based approach to addressing skill deficits and behavioral excesses. That’s how I was trained, but this was the real world. There was no manual to give her, or support team to refer her to. It was just us, right here right now. So I improvised. I told her that our goal was to get this kid to want to do things with us, so we could teach him how to do things. We had to match his energy level and convince him that interacting with us could be just as fun as letting loose in his own private utopia. We threw balls, ran around the living room, and made lots of exciting sounds and funny faces. We won him over, and she was a natural. Mission accomplished.
Then came the hard part. I had to go, and leave her to figure out the rest. I knew it wasn’t nearly enough, but this was the harsh reality I had signed up for when I agreed to lead a new Habilitation agency. As the sole administrator of the organization, I didn’t have time in my schedule to keep training her, and there was no funding to hire someone else. I could only hope that the small glimpse of effectiveness I had shown her would be enough for her to evolve, and help this child thrive. I knew it was incomplete, but I reminded myself that building a successful organization takes time. All I could do was put my best foot forward, and be patient. The more we grew, the more we could do.
Budget Cuts
2009 seemed like a setback year for just about everyone. The recession hit full force, and state budget cuts ensued. One late Friday afternoon, we received a surprise email from DDD saying our funding had been cut 10%. We were already struggling to break even. My first reaction was calm—don’t panic. You’ve faced tougher things than this, like when you started AZA United with no money, clients or staff. You have a team now. We’ll find a way to make this work. I learned a lot about myself in that moment.
Then things got even harder, with another 5% cut. Our goal had been to raise Habilitator pay rates; now the best we could do was grandfather rates for existing staff and lower the scale for new hires. We wanted to add more field supervision and training; now we were lucky when we could squeeze in any. This is temporary, I told myself. We’re not letting go of the dream. We’ve got the vision and the culture. All we need is time and money.
Reality Check
I remember presenting to our Board of Directors, who were all AZA parents. Our funding has been cut, I said, and we are operating in the red. So now we have two choices: invest or retreat. We can cut back every possible expense and just try to survive, accepting our fate as a subpar agency that once looked promising but now is nothing special. Or, we can take a risk and invest in our future, struggling in the short-term but thriving in the long-term, so that we never find ourselves in this predicament again, so dependent on one funding source.
Our board was brave. They recognized that none of this was worth it if we just became a duplicate of what already exists out there. The whole point of AZA United, and of the countless hours they volunteered their time to serve on the board, was to do something different. Something exceptional, to build a better support system for the autism community. This was not the time to give up.
We moved forward with getting a second office, and building new departments for speech therapy and ABA. These programs would help far fewer families, and be much more expensive. So why would we do that? One of our board members, Dr. Ruben Lara (or as I knew him, Master Yoda), advised us that expanding the depth and breadth of the organization was key to solving our hardest problems. These new programs would increase our organizational expertise, clinical quality, training capacity, and overall impact. Habilitators would have more incentive to stick with the job if we could offer a career path to more advanced and higher paying positions. Specialized services would attract the best clinicians in our field to come to AZA and produce amazing results. This enhanced credibility with colleagues, the community, and funding sources would open doors to advance our mission more than we ever imagined. We took his advice - when the great sage speaks, you listen.
I struggled with the notion of putting Habilitation improvements “on hold,” as we focused our available resources elsewhere. But I insisted to myself that someday, when we were ready, we would come back to it and fulfill the original vision of a truly comprehensive and effective Habilitation model.
The Wake Up Call
Last year, I signed up my whole management team for a seminar with Dr. Susan Kenny Stevens, who has a place in my literature hall of fame with her book Nonprofit Lifecycles. I’d seen her speak a year before. She blew the minds of everyone in the audience as she described, in the most accurate and honest detail, every stage we’d lived through as nonprofit directors, without knowing a single one of us.
Her model applies developmental psychology to nonprofit organizations—like kids, they go through different predictable stages as their future unfolds. Understanding these stages can help us cope with the challenges, and maximize our opportunity to influence success. We’d spent countless hours at AZA agonizing over challenges and uncertainties that, as it turns out, are a normal part of an organization’s development. They are “growing pains,” operationally defined.
Like everyone else in the audience, I’d often wondered if we were the only ones. Realizing we were not alone was, well, a huge relief. I was so impressed with her presentation that I asked her if she would serve as a consultant for AZA United. She was flattered, but not at a point in her life where she was seeking new clients. She did, however, offer to meet me for lunch for a pro bono brainstorming session. I took her up on it, and I still to this day refer back to my notes.
In her book, Dr. Stevens breaks down the stages of an organization’s development into a few simple categories. At each stage, there are indicators that help predict if the organization is likely to survive and grow into the next stage, or not. These stages include start-up, growth, maturity, and decline. The most important thing is to avoid decline—only a turnaround can save you then. The organization’s profile tells one story, but it is perhaps even more valuable to evaluate the lifecycle stage of each critical component within the organization separately. These pieces include individual programs and services, administrative functions, fundraising capacity, staffing versatility, equipment and information technology, board governance, etc. I was so proud to see that most of our stages appeared to be in growth or early maturity.
But then, our Finance Director pointed out that our Habilitation program was showing signs of decline. I was shocked. How could anything be in decline, when all we do is try to improve and grow? But she was right. We had focused so intensively on everything but Habilitation for too long. Services weren’t growing, training was inconsistent, and wait times for families were unreasonably long. Too many times we matched a Habilitator with a family, only to find out shortly after that it didn’t work out. Too many direct care staff were leaving us for better paying jobs, sometimes before even starting. We were making too many excuses about what was inevitable. Was this the dream of better care we always envisioned? Did we still strive to be the best? If so, what were we waiting for?
Helping Today, Building Tomorrow
So here we are. It is now Year 10 for AZA United, and Habilitation 2.0 has finally arrived. All those new programs and departments ended up shaping our whole infrastructure. Our depth of knowledge, skills, experience and efficiency are better than ever, and increasing exponentially every year. We have incredible, talented people involved and committed to the organization at every level. We’re ready. It’s time to make the changes that we believe can redefine the value of Habilitation here in Arizona for children with autism.
It starts with getting, keeping, and grooming amazing Habilitators. To do that, we raised Habilitation pay rates to be the most competitive in the valley. We added new benefits. We built exciting career paths for Habilitators. We redesigned and expanded our Habilitator orientations and Habilitation trainings to make them engaging, inspiring, and effective.
We also need to make sure that in-home services have the help they need to succeed. We changed the way we match Habilitators with families, so that connections are easily made, and we are there to help at every step of the way. We added layers of in-home training and support for Habilitators and families, with flexibility and availability. Our other programs and services fill gaps for families and enhance the work experience for Habilitators. And for the first time, we have a team of senior staff solely dedicated to making our Habilitation program the best it can be, and they are a sensational group. The pieces are finally in place, and change is happening!
After 10 years, it is again the beginning of something great. We understand who we are, what we do, and how we can help. We believe in it, we build it together, and we invite everyone to join us.
Helping today, building tomorrow.
Learn more about Habilitation Services or Habilitator Job Opportunities
