🏢 Ground Up Project’s New Facility: The Resting Tree, dedicated to providing adult care for people with special needs, opens in Niceville.
👨👩👧👦 Serving Families and Special Needs Adults: Offering life skills training, arts and crafts, and social activities to up to 30 adults at a time.
🏥 Focused on Safety and Quality: Despite challenges with state regulations, the facility ensures high standards for care and oversight.
It took me about five minutes longer than it probably should have to find the facility.
After all, the GPS took me from the Mid Bay News office inside of Movement Mortgage to the 7 Brew, instead of the strip center across the street.
That meant crossing John Sims Parkway, which is akin to fording a digital river in the Oregon Trail video game, and maybe twice as dangerous.
But I eventually made it to my destination after what should have been a two-minute drive.
Tucked in the back of the center, still under the New American Funding sign, is the Ground Up Project’s very first facility – The Resting Tree.
The building smells of fresh renovation – thanks to a weekend of sweat equity from these members. All four, Lisa Pitell, Brianna O’Brien, Brittany Lynch, and Eric Hambright, have children who are rapidly aging out of the (robust) infrastructure for Children with Autism and other disabilities in the Emerald Coast area in and around Niceville. Facilities like the Emerald Coast Autism Center drew many of the families to relocate here in the first place.
But their kids are getting closer to adulthood – and they are getting closer to the day when they will be physically unable to care for their children.
That’s why they decided to create the Ground Up Project. To make a community for them and their families to thrive – and not feel so alone.
The Ground Up Project focuses on providing services for adults with special needs, and envisions a facility in Niceville that has in-residence facilities and day-use facilities to provide enriched lives for those adults.
This marks the first step in a long journey to make their dream a reality.
Brianna O’Brien talks about her son, Sawyer, with a massive smile on her face. “People look at my son and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, He is so handsome. He should be a model,” but she knows the other side of the equation. He will grow up and still need full-time care because of his disabilities.
“I think they see my kid’s humanity,” Brittany Lynch said, “everyone can rally around kids.”
“We’re worried about the next stage,” Hambright said.
“They’re not cute anymore,” Pitell said about their growing up, “but their functioning is still that of kids.”
They say that leads to isolation for many people with special needs, which eventually leads to shorter lifespans because of health issues and suicide.
Right now, something like 80% of adults with special needs live with a caregiver, most of whom are family members. When those caregivers die or can no longer support the person with special needs, they rarely have somewhere to go.
The limited programs with public support have waiting lists that stretch on for years, sometimes decades. Someone who makes it into a public program almost always stays in it until they die.
Meaning that the need for full-time special needs adult care is essential, but there are precious few providers on the Emerald Coast – or around the country.
The Ground Up Project hopes to have its facility on several acres in Niceville, providing everything a special needs client could need, but not yet.
Many other organizations around the country share the same goal, but they often encounter a barrier that they cannot seem to overcome.
They will find their vision for the project, secure initial fundraising support, and complete other key tasks, including creating a logo. But then they stop progressing.
Most organizations start the fundraising process, only to see it slowly kill them, because the fundraising goal for a facility like this is in the millions of dollars. Ground Up noticed it in their work. “We kept circling back,” Pitell said, “this is what our community is going to look like. Then we said, ‘Okay, we need to get some land.’ Then we circled back again – We’re like, ‘we need to raise some money.’ But now what? You know? We were still getting stalled out at every point.”
The gap between the final idea and their current position was just too vast – like many other similar non-profits.
Eric Hambright remembers his excitement to meet with another group that members of Ground Up thought was “ahead” of them in the process to build a facility at a conference in South Florida only to find out that, even though they had several years’ head start on Ground Up – they hadn’t made much more significant progress on their facility.
That’s when they decided to put the horse before the cart – to open up programs they had intended to create after building their facility, using the revenues and notoriety generated from them to support the construction of the final facility. “The needs of the program are already around here,” Hambright said, “I mean, the needs for the full-time care community are there now, too. It’s just that we can’t do it yet, but the need for these programs is there now. “
The facility plans to serve up to 30 special needs adults at any given time and provide programming that can range from pottery classes to job training for the clients.
Inside the building, they have a sensory room, a quiet room, a room for classes, and a first aid room.
The group plans to have a client-to-staff ratio of 12:1 and has hired a facility director to lead the facility and take care of day-to-day operations.
The board’s leadership was shocked by how easily they obtained their licenses to open the facility.
Precisely because the state has no requirements for licensure to open a facility like this one, if you do not take state money to subsidize your cost,- you can do pretty much whatever you want in a facility like this.
It’s a reality that gives more than pause to the board members.
They initially decided not to take state money due to the rules and regulations the state set out for them. They argue that these rules are nonsensical and fail to protect and empower clients. “What gives them the knowledge to know what is good and what is not good for this population when we live with it every single day,” Lynch said. She cited one of the regulations – that facility management cannot lock doors on the facility- as an example. “You know, when you have participants who cannot speak for themselves, safety is of the utmost importance. And like I was telling you about the community hub where they couldn’t lock the gate, and in the same breath, the director was telling us, one of the residents got out and hopped into the lake across the street.”
However, just because they believe the current state regulations are ineffective doesn’t mean these facilities should lack regulation, according to Ground Up board members.
In the meantime, they say they will maintain the same standards for inspections, training, and safety as the state.
The facility will open to the public on September 18th, but applications are now being accepted at this link.
It will start by opening up to a maximum of 12 participants for various activities at once. As the facility gets its processes and employees in place, they plan to expand their services to up to 30 adults at any given time.
Some of the planned activities include life skills training, arts and crafts, games, physical activity, and social interaction.
It should be noted that the facility can accommodate far more than 12 people at any given time; they are simply limited to the maximum number of people in the facility at a given time.
Pro Communi Bono
St. Francis De Sales, Ora Pro Nobis!
