A witty, controversial and compassionate collection of articles and essays from an author who understands disability firsthand. Dave Hingsburger prods us to re-examine our good ideas about ways of serving people with disabilities.

Forty insightful, realistic, and inspiring essays describe what it is like to grow up with a disability. These successful adult role models offer great hope for parents.

Simon, a writer and professor, spends a year taking bus trips with her spirited sister Beth, who has a disability. This transcending journey changes Simon's life in incredible ways.

Give the gift of information about sexuality and safety. This guide offers age appropriate techniques for parents and providers who serve preschool children with disabilities. Learn to detect the signs of abuse and how to respond.

Scanning the Horizon helps address the prevention of abuse and neglect in organizations that serve vulnerable people. Learn a proven method of risk assessment that uncovers and examines critical data about both the people you support and paid staff.

A well crafted service and support agreement can contribute significantly to the quality of life for an individual with a developmental disability. Major issues will occasionally arise between a provider of services and an individual. How well they are resolved depends on how well expecations and responsibilities were discussed and agreed to beforehand. Service and Support Agreements covers essential concerns such as the support or program areas, relevant supports, communications, medical services and financial services. A sample agreement form is included.

Proactive supports and services can help people with disabilities to develop successful, caring relationships and increase their skills, self-esteem, personal productivity, pride in their work, fun and excitement. This colorful training and development tool offers activities, examples and dozens of ideas for helping your staff shift from reactive to proactive thinking.

This tool takes workers and managers beyond simple "do this, do that" instructions for dealing with severe, challenging behaviors. A hypothetical client, Suzie Brown, lives in a home with five other adults who also have developmental disabilities. She has no speech and is prone to self-injury. Her increasing behavior is causing distress for Suzie and everyone else, and all the usual pacifiers no longer work. The Suzie Brown Intervention Maze offers an engaging process for group decision-making. Each page presents a new scenario and options for helping Suzie move forward. A decision log helps the group track their progress, and the binder format allows for easy photocopying.

In this follow-up to Emergence, Temple Grandin describes her work as a scientist and innovative designer of slaughterhouses. Grandin takes her personal experiences as an individual with autism to work with her. She is credited with designing procedures that limit the trauma to animals being processed for food. Her remarkable story sheds light on both the riddle of autism and the power of those who challenge its boundaries.

A new employee in an agency that serves people with disabilities must learn how to serve and support people. But, how can the employee possibly understand how a person with a disability feels? Vantage Point, an innovative orientation program, puts the new employee into the place of a person who cannot walk, a person who cannot see, and a person who has other disabilities. In a detailed and entertaining account, journalist Jim Heikkinen takes the reader through his day as a new employee experiencing Vantage Point. George Suess outlines the steps needed to start a Vantage Point program and explains how a successful program can teach empathy quickly and remove common stumbling blocks in the training process.

Agencies no longer have to take a passive role in employee compensation, and allow outside forces to wear away at their mission and their highest goals. Proactive compensation provides incentives to each person in the agency to reach higher achievement, and, ultimately, to be a valued steward of the agency's mission. Variable Pay describes how to structure compensation for home-based teams and for other areas of the agency; how to make constructive use of employee evaluations; how to get a program started; and how to keep it going.

Gain a wealth of ideas for working with emotionally fragile, agitated, socially disruptive, perseverative, aggressive and other behaviors. This popular manual now offers even more guidance from psychologist Nathan Ory. His outstanding prevention, guidance, training and crisis management techniques can be used in a residential, classroom, workplace or community setting. The book is now published in both the U.S. and Canada, so you pay no international shipping charges.