Granite Bay Connections, Inc., (GBC) employs an innovative model to deliver Home & Community Based Services in one or two person community residences. Beginning with a professional roommate, supports can be gradually faded as individuals demonstrate increased self-management skills and reduced risk to themselves and the community.

The professional roommate, a trained “Enhanced Family Care Provider” serves as the core of this model providing the necessary day-to-day mentoring and supervision critical to “active treatment”. We encourage the “individual” to identify this “provider” as their “roommate”, creating a normalizing context for their relationship.

For our forensic programs, to ensure that this “roommate” stays refreshed, the Agency pairs them with a second worker who serves as their weekend counterpart. By extension, they continue the roommate role, ensuring continuity of “active treatment” and consistency of quality. The presence of “one voice” can minimize confusion, treatment inconsistency, and triangulation while improving personal ownership and trust.

For individuals requiring more intense supports, the Agency can bolster this core with another layer of staffing. Utilizing “Direct Support Professionals”, this second tier of supports can assist the professional roommate in rendering services, providing crisis stabilization without diluting the “one voice”. Eventually, when the crisis passes, this additional layer of services can be pealed back, leaving the “roommate” core.

The professional roommate and their support team are supervised by an assigned Program Manager who oversees the clinical and business functions of the home. The Program Manager is available for immediate consultation, providing a twenty-four hour a day, seven day a week resource to the individual and their support team.

Members of the GBC Service Team are trained to meet standards established within the Direct Service Professional curriculum. All staff persons receive specific training as needed to provide high quality support. Training is most often focused on how to adapt interactions with the person served so that positive relationships and a sense of mutual trust and respect will be developed over time. Staff training is individualized so that the training is focused on the individual served and not on abstract concepts. Community resources (i.e. YMCA) are used whenever possible to promote inclusion and to reduce reliance on resources that are unique to people with disabilities.

To effectively reach out to individuals and their collateral supports outside the Agency, GBC encourages active communication at all levels in the organization. Active communication ensures that “best practice” remains more than just an ideal; but rather that it becomes the application of continuous quality improvement.