Banyan’s Adult Protection Service Workers (APSW) main role is to help connect a client to community supports so the person can achieve their goals.  When the APSW program started to support adults with developmental disability the team found common threads within their planning meetings:

1.  Many adults living at home wanted to move out on their own, or
2. Adults that had move out without the needed skills to maintain their home were often threaten with evicted due to the state of the home.

Cooking, Laundry, Budgeting/Paying Bills, Cleaning, Grocery Shopping and Safety Consideration are the main life skills everyone needs to successfully live independently. For the average person, the goal to “successfully move out” is fairly easy to manage. For an adult with a developmental disability this is not the case for many situations.

To support a person to achieve the goal to “move out” became a task that was multi-layered and complicated as every person’s situation was different. Due to the unique circumstances of each individual, available community supports could not offer education at a basic level. The more the staff tried to connect the person to skills education the more barriers came up blocking the ability to assist the person’s goal of living on their own and/or to have a safe place to live. The list of barriers also was frustrating to families struggling to help their son/daughter.

After initiating the LEAN Six Sigma quality improvement process, the team advocated for such a service using informed evidence to support the business case. In 2024-25 Banyan successfully secured funding from the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services to create curriculum to support learning while providing the needed flexibility to create an individualized teaching plan based on the needs of each person. Developing such a program sounds simple, but the journey became a path of learning for APSW too.  We found that the curriculum not only had to adjust to the person’s needs, but it also had to be easy to use for the family member/community staff who are going to design and teach the skill. ‘Diabolical’ is the word that came to mind when sorting out how to get this tool up and working because as one issue was solved it would create another issue.  The team was determined to make this work and, in the end, with the help of technology, we able to proudly create a program which allows any family/staff member anywhere to use this skills-base resource to customize an educational program to teach any of the 6 skills noted above.

Over 10 weeks APSW staff trialed the newly created program by teaching 2 people the skill of cooking.  The clients were delighted to successfully complete the program with the learned knowledge of:

• How to use a stove, oven kettle, toaster, microwave and air fryer to make meals on the same devices would be used at home
• Nutritious food choices
• Simple recipes
• Eating out verses preparing meals at home
• How and when to use various kitchen tools
• Kitchen safety and first aide

The pride was obvious to anyone who watch these two people as they learned.  The next part of this learning was for the staff to support the family to encourage the person to use their skills at home so they could continue to gain confidence in cooking.