Community Connections: DSW Cooperative reinvents support for people with developmental disabilities

Posted on Wednesday, August 8th, 2018

It took a high school drama class for Lisa Murray to settle on a career. However, her decision had nothing to do with acting, directing, or production.

During the class, Murray volunteered to support two classmates with Down syndrome. She was amazed at the attitudes of the young men, the happiness they found in the smallest things.

“It really made me (question) why I was stressing about these big things in life when I could focus on a simple smile from a friend,” she says. “They really just changed my outlook on life so I decided to start doing this full-time.”

As a result, providing support for people with developmental disabilities not only became Murray’s job, but her “biggest passion.”

Mixing that passion with empathy and creativity — first during the two-year Developmental Services Worker program at Algonquin, and then in a varied eight-year career — has led Murray to break new ground in the field of developmental service work. The developmental service workers’ cooperative she created with three other Algonquin DSW graduates – Claire Maxwell, Elisabeth Van Kooy, Dawn Tait – could become a model for independent service work delivery across the province.

The cooperative won the $15,000 William G. Davis Innovations Fund Award in November 2017 – topping more than 80 innovation projects submitted by the students and alumni of colleges across Ontario.

“The DSW program taught us so much in order to get where we are now,” says Murray about herself and her coop partners.

“You learn about everything from working in a classroom to working with elderly in a long-term care facility, and everything in between. You learn about mental health, psychology, and pharmacology as well as just how to support people within the community.”

Murray’s says her career since graduation has given her a taste of most of these models.

Nonetheless, she still thinks, “the biggest thing that we learned (at Algonquin) was how important it is to have a person-centred philosophy, and make sure that we put the people that we support first.

“It’s not the (service) worker’s decision what clients do in their lives, it’s the client’s decision.”

This fundamental principle is at the heart of the DSW Cooperative, says Murray, who has focused on independent care outside an institutional setting for the latter part of her career. This is the area where the need is greatest, she says.

Murray acknowledges that working as an independent can be challenging. Budgeting, billing, scheduling, tax implications, among other matters, can make a salaried position with an institution seem more attractive.

But there is a desperate need for DSWs, she says. “I’ve found that families had so much difficulty finding workers and keeping good workers,” Murray says, adding that when she began working as an independent. “I could have worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

The idea of a cooperative, in which independent workers share in the ownership and management duties while providing the kind of person-centred care Algonquin’s program champions, was the brainchild of Minda Bojin, a developmental disabilities advocate who had difficulty finding workers to support her daughter, Murray explains.

Bojin brought her idea to Algonquin DSW Professor Laura Rogal-Black, and the pair obtained provincial funding to study the feasibility of a cooperative. When the study confirmed the need for such a model, Rogal-Black convened a meeting with graduating students and alumni to see who might be interested.

Murray says she and her partners met and immediately clicked. “For the last year we’ve been really busy creating the business, planning, getting the insurance, creating the policies and procedures, and doing all the background work in order for us to be ready for our launch in June,” she says.

The William G. Davis Innovation award was icing on the cake. “We knew what we were doing was amazing, but it was really great to know there were other people who thought it was amazing.”

Murray credits much of the cooperative’s success in the competition “to the Algonquin College support we got,” including the professors who helped them put together the proposal for the award competition. “(Rogal-Black) was with us every step of the way.”

The cooperative is currently engaged in finding more partners with the personalities and interests that match as closely as possible those of potential clients, says Murray.

“Our biggest goal is to make sure we provide those high-quality support workers,” she says. “We’re engaging the people we’re supporting as much as possible in every aspect of what we do.

“We want to make sure that we stay person-centred and expand to make as many matches as possible, so we can have those long-term, life-long connections.”


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