Jennifer Sulewski, Ph.D., FAAIDD is a national expert on community life engagement (CLE) for people with IDD. She has authored numerous peer-reviewed publications on CLE, has presented locally and nationally at conferences on CLE, and has provided consultation to state agencies and service providers across the country on how to improve day services and supports. From 2014–2017 she was PI of the Field Initiated CLE Project, a NIDILRR-funded effort to study how to improve day services and supports for CLE, which led to identification of Four Guideposts for Community Life Engagement and a toolkit for service providers. Currently she is PI of another Field Initiated project developing a Guideposts Fidelity Scale for service providers to assess their level of adherence to the Four Guideposts for CLE. Dr. Sulewski is a Fellow of the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and past co-chair of the Disabilities and Other Vulnerable Populations Topical Interest Group of the American Evaluation Association. She received her Ph.D. in Social Policy from Brandeis University in 2006, with a dissertation titled In Search of Meaningful Daytimes: Community-Based Nonwork Supports for Adults with Developmental Disabilities.
ICI developed the four guideposts for community life engagement (CLE) and the CLE toolkit to provide a framework and examples of what high-quality day services and supports should look like. The most recent addition to the toolkit is the CLE Fidelity Scale (CLEFS), a statistically valid and reliable tool for service providers to assess how their current day services and supports align with the four guideposts.
As states focus on expanding integrated employment opportunities for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and phase out sheltered work, they are finding a need to concurrently examine day services and supports that promote Community Life Engagement (CLE, see yellow box to the right for a detailed definition). These supports can be a wrap-around to ensure individuals’ engagement in the community is maintained and they continue to receive sufficient levels of support, despite fluctuations in job status and hours.
The State Employment Leadership Network (SELN) is a membership-based network of state IDD agencies committed to making changes in their service systems to ensure access to competitive integrated employment for people with IDD (www.selnhub.org/home).
Delivered in conjunction with Cross Plains Community Partners, this powerpoint presentation provides an overview of the four guideposts in Community Life Engagement, as well as implementation strategies from a provider perspective.
Delivered in conjunction with The Arc of the United States and Starfire (provider agency), this powerpoint presentation provides an overview of the four guideposts of Community Life Engagement and their relationship to characteristics of transformative providers in general.
