Abilities Network

Community and employment partners and epilepsy services: community and employment partners' services are designed to provide individual support to adults with disabilities to live and work in their Maryland communties as valued and contributing citizens. Providing life skills through mentoring and training, 470 people are curently supported through team-developed, person-centered plans to identify goals to locate, maintain and grow independence in their community based jobs, home and/or systems of resources to ensure health, safety and happiness.

Healthy families: healthy families baltimore county (hfbc) is part of a national effort to support new parents with helping their children have a healthy start in life. Services are available to families of children prenatally through age five. Initial contact must occur either prenatally or within two weeks of the baby's birth. Hfbc provides assessments, information and referral services, intensive home visitation, parent education, crisis intervention, advocacy, child development assessment, and parent group meeting to participating families.

Project act: project all children together works with child care programs, out of school time programs and communities to provide training, coaching, and mentoring to improve the quality of care and support the inclusion of all children in these programs. Project act recieves funding through grants from the Maryland state department of education, Maryland family Network, and various other private and public funders. As the child resource center of baltimore, harford and cecil counties, childcare providers and programs can receive technical assistance and training in core of knowledge areas that will assist with keeping their credentials current to meet childcare licensing requirements and learn how to fully include children with disabilities in childcare settings. (continued on schedule o )knowledge areas include: professionalism, child development, health, safety, and nutrition, special needs, and community. Under these categories, project act develops and delivers training modules to meet the needs of childcare professionals and teachers. Trainings are provided at project act's site and on-site at child care program locations. As a result of these trainings, childcare professionals are more comfortable with working with a variety of children and delivering the best services possible to all children in their care. These trainings are also available on a fee-for-service basis to providers outside of the grant funded counties. Project act provides free onsite child consultation services in baltimore, harford and cecil county. Through this project, project act consultants provide case management services to children who have challenging behaviors and are in danger of expulsion from the child care center. The goal of this project is to retain the child in child care and to provide the necessary resources to child care providers, children and parents. Project act also provides mental health consultation to the y of central Maryland's head start programs in baltimore city and baltimore county. Project act receives funding to implement inclusive child care programming and to raise the quality of early childhood education for all children. Partners include the baltimore county community development block grant program, the Maryland developmental disabilities council and other foundations.

Senior services: senior services provides community education on a variety of topics related to seniors, their health and housing issues. Senior speaker series are held through the year in the Abilities Network training institute and also presented in the community at large. All speakers and trainings are open to the public and are free of charge. We also provided mutliple seminars to the public. Topics include: "right-sizing and moving made easy," "get organized", "shred, file or pile: what to do with all this paper?" These presentaiton are offered at local senior centers, community organizations and senior living communities. Often we also join forces with other business owners in the aging field to create panel discussions for the public.move management services is a fee or service program which includes one-on-one support to help people navigate through the complicated process of relocation and downsizing. Move management services will be offered to seniors and people with disabilities. For many people, relocation can be one of the most stressful events in their lifetime. Move management services are customized to assist every step of the way with the understanding that very person's move is different, both emotionally and physically.