Victoria on future direction of Community Living BC

Last Friday, both BC Premier Christy Clark and BC Social Development Minister Stephanie Cadieux announced a new plan with respect to Community Living BC (CLBC) which includes $40 million in additional funding to 3 new funds.  All the details can be read from the Vancouver Sun article here

Meantime - BC Tourism/Jobs Minister Pat Bell, through his "Top Ten" released today summarized the new direction with respect to CLBC as follows:

1. Develop a coherent “one government” policy framework for persons with developmental disabilities. As part of this change, families can expect more consistent levels of support when they transition from MCFD to CLBC.

2. Implement a more consistent assessment platform across the Ministries of Children and Family Development, Health, Education, and Social Development, along with CLBC, to ensure consistency and clarity of needs assessment and planning for individuals and their families. This will allow for better identification of individual needs, improving individual planning.

3. Use a coherent and integrated system to track demand, wait times and service delivery across relevant ministries and CLBC. A better system needs to be developed and implemented that more clearly identifies actual, real-time need for services.

4. Improve cross-government planning for individuals who are transitioning through different types of care, to reduce stress on them and on their families. This includes engaging earlier with youth transitioning to adulthood, but also focussing on older adults who may be transitioning to seniors’ care.

5. Maintain CLBC as a Crown Agency. Implement changes to address mandate tension created by generational change, and improve approach to and relationship with families and individuals.

6. Implement new government capacity focused on transition supports. New capacity is being identified to focus on the transition to adulthood, to address the gap created when youth leave high school.

7. Increase employment services planning and supports, as well as alternative day programming options.

8. Support greater use of individualized funding. The move to individualized funding will give families a greater say in the way their loved ones are supported and provide greater stability to families over the long term. This transition, which has already begun, will be made possible through the development of community capacity and increasing funding to CLBC.

9. CLBC and Ministry of Health to assess and model needs of the older cohort of individuals with developmental disabilities and develop a three-year plan to meet those needs and ensure early planning with families.

10. Reinforce government’s accountability and responsibility for CLBC through more effective use of legislative authorities. The Province will require the development of standards for tracking and prioritizing service requests and identification of assessment tools.
a. A permanent appeal mechanism will be established for families.
b. The Office of the Advocate for Quality Service will continue to provide support to families and individuals.
c. Where the Representative for Children and Youth has been involved in supporting a young person before the age of 19 or their family, she will be given the capacity to continue supporting them through their transitioning years.

11. Recognizing the nature and growth of caseload, and the need to provide different types of programs for a new generation of individuals with developmental disabilities, government has been tracking the funding requirements in the contingency allowance, and will draw down the contingencies vote by $40 million starting in 2012/13 to implement these recommendations.

12. Support ongoing innovation in the sector, and recognize and support the innovations developed, championed and undertaken by families and individuals.