If a group of people wanted to take on the challenging work of opening a residential community—call it a group home, a residential community, or whatever else you like—for people with disabilities, they should know what steps to take, what phases to respect, and what new languages they'll need to learn.
Designing a community offers a concrete answer to a question heard often in the world of disability: What will become of this young person when the family is gone or no longer able to care for him? What lies ahead for him, after we're gone?
Saying "let's open a community" is not easy. But even if you reach that decision, everything is still ahead of you. Together, in stages, you must develop a project—a blueprint for what you want to create. Some guiding questions can help:
- Do we want a community run entirely on volunteer labor, sustained by divine providence?
- Or do we want to build a proper organization where residents and staff receive salaries, supported by government subsidies that residents get in return for living there?
Experience teaches that at the beginning you almost always need a healthy dose of volunteer work and trust in providence—otherwise you'd never get started. But then it becomes essential to build the conditions for the community to become as self-sufficient as possible, respecting the law and demanding that others do the same.
This is socially sound: a state has a duty to meet the needs of people in difficulty, and through the community's work, we ask that it fulfill that duty. And through its activities, the community creates jobs for young people, guiding them toward a profession of service.
This is also theologically sound: those acting from faith-based values should not replace the state, but can help it do its duty by creating services where none exist and by aiming for quality in the work they do.
The points that follow are simply guidelines for those who wish to take this path.
Community and communion
It often happens that someone thinking about opening a community worries—and rightly so—about finding a house, gathering people willing to live there, and raising the money to start. But this alone is not enough. In fact, it may not even be the right place to begin. A community can only be born from communion.
One person cannot go far alone. All the things that need doing and knowing, the different skills required, the constant dialogue with reality, and the need to be flexible—to be willing to change course and find a way around obstacles—all of this points to the creation of a small group (not too many, not too few) who, working together through their own gifts, shepherd the community into being.
It is good ground for testing the motivation and relational capacity of each person. From this ground, through this preliminary work, a solid community project can emerge—and also the future board of directors: those people who, though not living in the community, help, support, and create the necessary conditions for the community to thrive.
A realistic project
For a community project to take shape, you need serious research, study, and dialogue with what already exists. This is not wasted time—it lets you identify, from the start, the conditions necessary for the community to exist and live.
A project is not made once and for all; it is built over time. The core idea—giving a home to those who don't have one, building a network of vital relationships—doesn't change. But the way you carry out that idea can shift. Two conditions are essential: flexibility (the ability to change how you realize the vision, mental elasticity) and realism (understanding the requirements set by institutions and their laws, knowing what already exists).
What you need to know
3.1 Know your territory
What services exist in the area where you want to create a community? Who offers them? Who manages them? How do they work? What difficulties do existing services face? You can get this information from the local health authority's Social Services department, from social workers in the area, or by visiting existing organizations directly. These details let you understand the landscape—not just numbers, but the actual path others have walked, with all its successes and struggles. There is much to learn from people who have already started an association or cooperative, who have navigated convenants with government bodies and all the steps that entails.
3.2 Know the laws
Each region has its own social welfare plan and has enacted laws governing the delivery of social services. You can request copies from the regional social services office or your local government's social services department.
Knowing these laws is fundamental to developing a community project, because they set out all the conditions necessary for working with public agencies.
The Social Welfare Plan of the Lombardy region, for example, includes a section on disability. Reading it reveals:
- Who can manage a service (what qualifications private organizations need to enter into an agreement);
- Under what conditions (being a nonprofit, a social solidarity cooperative, and so forth);
- Which services the region recognizes (emergency intervention centers, residential communities, group homes for people with severe disabilities, etc.).
For each service, the plan specifies:
Management standards
- the definition (what it is)
- who it serves
- admission criteria
- capacity
- how it operates
- what activities it provides
- staffing (what roles, what qualifications, how many people...)
Structural standards
- building requirements (what the house must be like)
- location (where it must be)
- accessibility (removal of architectural barriers)
- layout of common spaces
- layout of residential units (which rooms, how many, what size)
- utilities (gas, electricity, etc.)
- structural elements (doors, windows, flooring...)
- furnishings
- outdoor spaces.
These are precious and binding guidelines because they let you take the right steps at the right time. From choosing the legal structure the community (or whoever manages it) will adopt, to deciding which professionals to hire and under what contracts, from how to renovate a house or which house to look for and how to meet the standards required for an agreement—everything is guided by what the law sets out. It is not difficult work, especially if someone in the group has some familiarity with legal language and can translate it for the others.
Only after you have looked at what already exists and understood the conditions the law imposes can you begin to develop a concrete project with phases, timelines, and a distribution of tasks: who will handle the legal structure, who will find the house, who will raise the startup funds. With the project, the community is only conceived; there is still the whole gestation period before birth. We will return to this.
- Manuela Bartesaghi, 1997