October 5, 2017 at 2:35 p.m.
Gracie's Place seeks to fill gaps in special needs services
A place for families and kids, for hope and help
Gracie's Place seeks to fill gaps in special needs services
By Richard Moore-
There's a long way to go.
Still, existing centers such as Headwaters, to cite just one example, continue to engage in innovative programs, such as Project Search, a workplace transitions school-to-work program centered in the workplace; a new autism-specific charter school for grades 7 through 12 is in the works and a likely reality in the Lakeland area; and new and smaller networks of parents and service providers are forming by the year, from Minocqua to Rhinelander to Eagle River and beyond.
But none of the people behind these efforts are any more ambitious or more committed or working any harder than the team coalescing around Gracie's Place, a non-profit children's therapy and family resource center in Woodruff, whose founders say they hope not only to help provide special-needs children with services that are now lacking but also to form a community of hope for the families involved.
Hope for the family and help for the kids is their goal.
The founders of Gracie's Place are actually a family: Deb, Pete, Cora, and Grace Adams. Deb and Pete are the parents and the drivers of the effort; Cora is 18; and their seven-year-old daughter Grace, who has autism and ADHD, is the inspiration.
Only recently returned to the state, the family is originally from Wisconsin, and lived in the Lakeland area for a number of years. For four years they lived in the Lexington, Ky., area, where Deb is working toward a master of divinity at Asbury Theological Seminary and serves as the seminary's communications director.
Perhaps ironically, it was the wealth of services available to Grace in Kentucky that helped to trigger the Adams' idea to return and begin to provide those services here.
"I walked into her pre-school with her and we had just been at therapy and I just had an image of a center in my head," Deb said in an interview with The Times recently. "And then I had an image of her playing in it, and it was like, 'Oh my gosh, I wonder,' because we've just benefitted so much for our Grace, how far she has come."
Deb said she and Pete had been talking with friends in the Northwoods, and it became clear that services in northern Wisconsin not only did not exist on the level they saw in Kentucky but were actually sparse and, in some cases, nonexistent.
"There are hundreds of kids with special needs and little in the way of outside services for them," Deb and Pete explain in one of their handouts. "Parents may have to drive hundreds of miles to get the services their kids need, or they simply have to move or make the choice to do without."
Deb and Pete did not think that was right, and so they decided to uproot their family, return to the area, and jump into an effort to provide Northwoods families with the kind of services that were available to them in Kentucky.
Hence, Gracie's Place. The center is not yet open, and the Adams say the effort is a work in progress, but they have a board of directors, help from a wide array of people, and they are looking for others who wish to help as well as to connect with those who might need their services, which will range from occupational therapy to physical therapy to speech/language therapy and more.
They also want to serve as a center for family education, resources, and support, and to partner with parents of special-needs children. They plan to provide parent training, education, and support in therapy sessions; specialized parenting classes; respite care for parents; and mentoring classes and community support groups.
Two missions
Deb and Pete Adams say they have two overarching missions.
"One is, we want to meet the practical needs of the kids, which is the therapy piece," Deb said. "We have an occupational therapist who is ready and willing. We have a speech-language pathologist who is ready and willing. I have a physical therapist who is hard for me to get together with right now but she is ready and willing. And there's another physical therapist who wants to come on board but I have to talk with her and see where she is at."
Basically, Deb says, the center will focus on therapists working with families.
"They will arrange their own schedules," she said. "It will be based on what the families need and what works for the therapists. The therapists we are working with right now work part time at other places, too, so this will be part time and as we grow we will see what happens."
The work will be contracted out, Deb said, at least initially.
"Billing will go through Gracie's Place and we will pay the therapists," Deb said. "Right now we are working to become a preferred provider with the different insurance companies that we have."
A person with experience in medical billing is helping on the insurance side, Deb said, and Deb herself is experienced in grant writing, which Deb thinks will be important for funding those who might not otherwise have the means or insurance to afford services.
"That's how we funded Grace's therapies, so, to help the families if they don't have adequate funding through their insurance companies, we can do grant writing and help them navigate those waters in order to pay for it," she said. "So there's any number of ways we are looking at - maybe a sliding fee scale based on need, or a scholarship program - and we have people helping us with that back end."
Deb says she has been thinking they have to attain preferred provider status before they can open their doors, but that might not be the case.
"I think we can just offer it to families and say, 'OK, we can charge you at a cash rate and then you can turn the (bills) into your insurance and, even if we're not preferred providers right now, it will count toward your deductible, so we're trying to navigate that process right now," she said.
The Adams are coming off a highly successful and well-attended open house as they ramp up their efforts to spread the word about Gracie's Place, and they say they welcome all the help people are willing to give.
"That's part of the reason why we wanted to do an open house because we want people to know that this is what we are doing, here's who we are, but we are also just parents and we don't know the back end so - and I mean truly and as humbly as I can say it - we need help to figure all of it out. And what's cool is that there are people coming on to help us."
And, as with the person helping with the medical billing, there are many others, Deb said.
"It's been that way through the whole process," she said. "It's 'OK, I'm not quite sure how to do this, but I think I can figure it out, or I can find somebody to help me figure it out' and then somebody comes along."
As community support grows, Pete thinks the financing issue should sort itself out.
"We think if the community gets on board, they will view it as, 'Can we help pick up the cost for somebody that can't?' because we're in this together," he said.
But there's another mission for Pete and Deb, too, and that's building community and a place for the families of children with special needs.
"We want that practical piece for the kids," Deb said. "Many of the kids, not all of them but many of them, need outside intervention in addition to what they are getting inside the school. So this is that practical piece of that."
But there's more, Deb said.
"There's a different piece, of community, that's in our hearts because we are parents," she said. "So what we want to do is form community for special-needs parents, so that there's a place for their kids to come but that there will be a place for them to come, too, because so often they are siloed because they are afraid to take the kids out to different things or events."
Gracie's place can be a place where everyone gets supports and feels welcome.
"We're looking to find that place where people can come and bring their kids, and we can have community for them and support each other as parents," she said. "We want it for the communities. We want it for the families, both the kids and the parents. We want it to be like a haven for people where they can just breathe."
The journey
So just how did Deb and Pete Adams find themselves on a journey that has taken them to Kentucky and back again, with little but inspiration, grit, and an idea in their heads?
Deb believes it is a calling from God.
Originally from Appleton and Sheboygan, the couple met and lived in the Lakeland area for several years and then lived in Tomahawk before heading to Kentucky. Deb was pursuing her Master of Divinity and then was hired as the seminary's communications director.
While there, they lived in Wilmore, near Lexington, the latter being home to the University of Kentucky. When Grace needed therapy, the Adams were grateful they lived in the area, for they discovered they had many options for the services they needed.
"Living so close to UK, we had eight choices for good therapy centers, all within a 20-minute drive from our house," Deb said.
In fact, the only real problem was, there were waiting lists for all of them.
"When we got Grace on that list it took us three months to even get in and that was only for occupational therapy, and then it took another three months for speech and there's eight different places you can choose from, so you know there's a huge need," she said.
Ultimately, Pete and Deb say, the accessibility to good care sparked the idea of returning to the Northwoods, where the options are far more limited, as they were finding out by talking to friends in the area.
"And then we started to get this whole idea of Gracie's Place," Deb said. "I'm working on my Master of Divinity, so we were looking at ministry work, and we look at this as a justice issue and a ministry calling because this is where God put us. We have this awesome little 7-year-old who has special needs and you don't know how hard it is to get help and so what we want to do is help."
Deb said she began to think about what the center would look like and involve.
"Then we started talking with people, and when we first started, I thought, 'I don't know if this is right' because the first two people I talked to were like, 'I'm not sure,' and then people were talking about the charter school and so I think the charter school was in their head and I'm like, 'No, I'm talking therapy center,' and that's a bit different and so they weren't quite catching it."
Nearly at a stopping point, Deb says she decided to call one last person. That call turned out to be a fateful one.
"I ended up calling the person who first came into our house to help out Grace when we knew something was wrong, and that was Cory Dart from Headwaters, and she is an amazing woman and that's just a phenomenal organization, and when I called her, she's like, 'Oh my gosh, this is a godsend' because she knew the need. And so we got the right person."
And things began to move, Deb and Pete say. They formed a small board of directors - Cory Dart, Rob Way, the executive director of development for Asbury Seminary, and the alumni director at Asbury serve on the board with Deb and Pete.
Prepared to sacrifice
Despite the progress, it has been a long road, and not least because until recently the Adams were still living in Kentucky.
"It's been a thought process for basically a year of feeling people out and coming here and talking to some of the parents and hearing 'yes, yes, yes, there's a need,'" Deb said. "It's been kind of fits and starts where we thought we were moving forward and then we weren't and trying to do it from Kentucky and trying to start a nonprofit from Kentucky in Wisconsin."
There was also the matter of Deb's full-time job, which she said she was prepared to sacrifice for her calling.
"I walked into my boss's office and said, 'I think God is calling me to do this thing,' not knowing if I was going to then be told, 'Well, great, let me see who I can find to replace you.' But what he did was grab a sheet of paper, and ask, 'What does it look like for you to do your job from Minocqua,' which is amazing in itself."
Now back in Wisconsin, and with their new space in Lakeside Plaza (the old bank building at the corner of Hwy. 51 and Townline Road in Woodruff), the project is percolating.
"We're just had a lot of help and we continue to get help, and people are just coming out of the woodwork right now," Deb said. "It's like all these little dots connecting together in the community right now. People are seeing the need, and the need is starting to be filled."
Fundraising has taken up a lot of time, Deb and Pete say.
"Basically the fundraising was with our family and friends," Deb said. "Also, at Asbury they have something called the Asbury Project, so you can kind of present your idea to them - it's a social entrepreneurship type of thing - and we presented that to them and we got some money for doing that as well, and we're part of that project, which is kind of cool that they support that. So at any rate, it just started building."
The Asbury Project is described as social entrepreneurs, along with business leaders, community leaders, and pastors, who undertake innovative approaches in using business to initiate positive social change - "innovative approaches in business as mission, community transformation, and how to transform your ordinary day's work into an extraordinary calling," according to the website's description.
It's hasn't been all fundraising, of course. There's the basics of what a therapy center needs.
"We spoke to therapists that Grace had been going to and asked them what would be the key pieces that we would need in the center," Deb said. "So we have hanging swings, a bunch of different swings that you can do, and they were like you need this, this, and this to start, so what we are doing here is called minimum viable product because we are starting small."
Starting small, Deb said, but she stressed that there's room to grow.
"We don't know how many so we are starting small in this room," Deb said. "We are going to do gross motor, fine motor, we're going to do speech in the room, physical therapy, occupational therapy and speech-language pathology all here, and then if we need to expand there is room. We are starting small because we want to stay viable. We don't want to overextend ourselves."
All about community
In the end, Pete Adams says there's no way Gracie's Place can be a success without community, and, he says, those who help Gracie's Place will find that they are helping themselves and the larger community, too.
"We have a sneaky, underhanded thing, too," he said with a smile. "If you work with a special needs child, you go into it and you say, 'I just went into it because I thought I could do some good, but after a while I understood that I got more out of it than them.' You will hear this over and over and over again. Give me an aspect of society and I will tell you where they will benefit from embracing special-needs kids and their families."
Deb also believes Gracie's Place can help the larger community navigate the realties of living and working with a significant special-needs population, and learn to accept them as full members of the community.
"How do we educate the community?" she asked. "How do we educate businesses to be friendly to families? This could be a place where people go and they learn how to do this thing of life with special needs kids."
And the model - providing the help the children need, providing support for special-needs families, educating the larger community - could be transformative and used in other communities, Deb said.
"This is a small community," she said. "What if you could incubate it here and then take it to other towns and say, 'This is how we did it. We formed a community around these families. The families form community and this community of families formed another community around the community. This is how we do it as a family. This is how this group over here transitioned people out, and this is how we did it with the charter school, and this is how we did it with Gracie's Place.' And this whole tapestry gets woven and you take it and say, 'Here, we'll turn the tapestry over, and this is where all the knots come together.'"
They come together as hope and help, she said, hope for the families and help for the kids.
And that, in a sentence, is what Deb and Pete Adams hope to achieve at Gracie's Place.
Richard Moore is the author of "The New Bossism of the American Left" and can be reached at www.rmmoore1.com.
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