osage connection winter spring 2009.indd - Orange Grove Center

Morton J. Kent Habilitation Center still a leader after 15 years
In the early 1990’s, the Board of Directors at Orange Grove Center had
an “awakening.”
While the center was amassing a fi fty-year history of creating respected
programs for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities,
they realized that the increasing degree of complex disabilities demanded
a new avenue of innovation. Thus, the idea for a dedicated center with the
responsibility for identifying emerging and evolving challenges that
would impact on clients with special needs began to catch both the
collective imagination and zeal of the board. The Habilitation Center
would serve as the seat of innovation that would address the needs of an
aging and increasingly fragile and vulnerable population.
Several factors contributed to the Board’s vision. They saw the level of
disabling conditions increasing. Technological advances in neonatal
intensive care saw the survival of high-risk newborns that would have
never lived even ten years before. These survivors had multiple and
combined challenges in cognition, behavior, learning, sensory, motor,
and medical areas. In addition, they foresaw the increasing longevity of
Page4
Dr. Rick Rader, Director of the Morton J. Kent Habilitation Center,
and Ruth Toon, Director of Residential Habilitation, will be
featured in an upcoming documentary called, “Living with Autism.”
The video is produced by MassMutual to compliment the
national survey conducted by Easter Seals.
individuals who were previously considered “lucky” to live into their twenties and thirties. These challenges required a new breed of
direct support professionals; highly trained and motivated with goals far beyond the traditional exhibition of “compassionate care.”
Finally, the board echoed the growing societal movement to increase the level of “expectations” of what individuals with developmental
disabilities could and needed to achieve. Orange Grove was given the “green light” to move forward with plans to establish a center that
would refl ect the dictates of Lawrence Miller, “The achievement of excellence can only occur if the organization promotes a culture of
creative dissatisfaction.”
Thus, what was to become the Morton J. Kent Habilitation Center began to break ground in 1993. Mr. Kent, a veteran board member, had
been given the reins to spearhead the creation of the center, outline its mission and formulate the benchmarks of its success.
A national search for the Center’s fi rst director had some challenges of its own. For one thing, there wasn’t a “pool” of professionals
who were currently engaged in “developmental disabilities medical futurism,” the term that was coined to identify and funnel potential
candidates that might be able to “pull this off.” While there were certainly pockets of researchers involved in developmental disabilities,
there was no existing similar setting that could describe what was envisioned at Orange Grove. Most of the research activities involved
single agendas related to cause, prevention, special education, bio and adaptive engineering, employment, habitation, healthcare, and
technology assistance. There was no single position that supported a researcher without borders, boundaries or beliefs.
Thus the fi rst innovation didn’t come “out” of the Habilitation Center; it went “into” it. The idea and notion that a center could maintain
multiple inter-connected research portfolios was an innovation itself. Before someone was even given the keys to the front door, the
center had a radical platform; that their coordinated efforts could drive and deliver programs in areas that were seemingly unrelated to
mainstream disability research.
The selection of Dr. Rick Rader as the Center’s fi rst Director evoked the belief that the most successful people are those who are good
at Plan B. This best described Dr. Rader who never even had a Plan A. Like most physicians, he had no formal training, experience or
expertise in the fi eld of intellectual and developmental disabilities. What he did have was cross-training in both medicine and medical
anthropology, and a key appreciation for the biocultural determinants of health and disease. Relying mostly on his training in anthropology,
he approached the opportunity with a cultural model. People with intellectual disabilities were a culture unto themselves; albeit part
of a greater cultural body. They and the community that supports them have their own beliefs, mythology, values, tools, language, social
structure, and history. His belief that you needed to understand, incorporate and employ these components laid the foundation for his appointment
as the Director of the Morton J. Kent Habilitation Center in 1994. It was at best a mutual leap of faith for the two unknowns;
a neophyte in the fi eld coupled with an idea without precedence and devoid of a clear blueprint. While far more developed than a sketch
on the back of a napkin, the Morton J. Kent Habilitation Center had no track record, no modes and no examples.
In the ensuing fi fteen years, the Habilitation Center has had its footprint in virtually every aspect of the fi eld of intellectual and developmental
disabilities. Signifi cant contributions have been made via the expansion of universal newborn screening, positioning OGC as the
fi rst agency in the U. S. to adopt a code of ethics, medical school curriculum development, adoption of using parents in medical education,
solid university teaching and research affi liations, invitations to participate in top level national disability task forces, including the
President’s Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities, the Dept. of Defense and the Surgeon General’s offi ce, as faculty in the
fi rst national interactive webinars in developmental disabilities, in creation of the fi rst research organization in the fi eld of sensory processing,
creation of comprehensive end of life programs, affi liation with Exceptional Parent Magazine, the professionalization of direct