CREATIVE CARING:

CREATIVE CARING-THE VITA-LIVING STORY It’s 1981. Doorbells were ringing and horns were honking as the family gathered for our annual Thanksgiving. But this year was different. Ricky was here, 5’8” of restless energy, eyes wandering, running up to everyone but unable to talk and tell them how happy he was to see them. Ricky, 23 years old, suffers from severe mental retardation and brain damage. For the past 18 years, he’s lived at a school for children with mental retardation in New Jersey. Now he’s home again. And little did any of us suspect, that this Thanksgiving would change all of our lives. Late that night, after Ricky had hit my husband Stan for insisting he turn off the TV, scared his siblings, reduced me to tears, and ruined the family meal, Stan and I sat down to confront the reality of having Ricky with us as an adult. We wondered what would happen to him if something happened to us. He needed a life in the community. There were no small group homes in Texas that would accommodate an adult with Ricky’s challenging behaviors. We decide that it was time someone changed all that. Creative Caring is the story of how one determined family set out to create a community home for the child they loved. By the time Stan and I decided to start Vita-Living, I had spent 25 years working in the mental health field. I knew enough to take the first steps – contact the state about funding, look for a home we could equip for residents like Ricky. Texas had never licensed such a home in the entire State. Stan knew enough to begin the process of raising money. But if we’d known then how much we still had to learn, how quickly we’d have to learn it and how many times we’d only just scrape by, perhaps Vita-Living would never have come to be. The road to Vita-Living was a bumpy one. In the 20 years that first Stan and I together and later I alone spent creating a home for Ricky and those like him, we faced bureaucratic hurdles, abuse from the community, economic challenges so severe we nearly had to shut down several times, and, most devastating of all, the death of my husband and Vita-Living’s co-founder just four years after we opened the first home. In building this organization and its community, I learned to be creative and flexible and to never accept the words “we can’t.” As we grew from one home to two to eighteen, as we found jobs and activities for our residents in the community and started up several businesses that could employ residents, we were graced with tremendous volunteers, a great deal of luck, and a family of residents who, for the first time in their lives, could feel as if there was a place for them. Perhaps most rewarding of all, I had the opportunity to see my own son grow and blossom into an adult who could successfully live away from me and relate to the world around him. Today Vita-Living serves as a model for other community homes for people with intellectual disabilities. It serves over 400 residents and offers a beacon of hope to families grappling with the challenges of raising a child with special needs into a responsible and fulfilled adult. Creative Caring is the story of how Ricky and Stan and I turned the challenges our family faced into triumph. But even more, it’s the story of how we succeeded in creating a more generous and nurturing environment for an entire population who has much to contribute the world around them.