By Sadie Hess, CEO
Compass SLS and ILS has been who we are as an organization for 25-plus years. Over the course of those 25 years, we have grown and matured. People have joined our organization with diverse talents and skills, and we have diversified in so many ways. Our capacity to steward more than SLS & ILS has grown and we are much more than those titles now. I have realized the language of calling ourselves an SLS & ILS company is now too small for where we are headed. We do so much more, and those things should be highlighted and shared. Let me highlight a few other parts of our organization beyond SLS and ILS.
QSP
We started looking for a software product over 14 years ago. We tried some and found them to be grossly inadequate because they didn’t quite get what we do. We were left sorely lacking functionality and flexibility as well as a cost-effective solution in one comprehensive solution. We needed a program that would take away some of our pain: trying to manage schedules, people, IHSS, Regional Center requests, timecards… the list went on and on! We wanted to focus on people. We wanted to focus on our clients and their care, so we needed to come up with a solution. QSP is our solution, a solution that meets our complex needs, but is still simple enough for everyone in our organization to use.
Instead of stopping there, we realized this was something our industry needed, so we began selling our software as a subscription service. We now have over 70 QSP customers that use QSP in nearly every Regional Center in California.
QSP is part of who we are and part of what we do. As we go after continuing to provide this as a service to our community and the larger community, it is important that we make room for QSP in our name. QSP is now part of our DNA and has made our world infinitely better.
BUILD
We have received several contracts to provide training to social and recreational organizations to move through the vendor process as well as help youth connect with needed services from their local Regional Center. We have been doing this through the Build Project this past year. We are focused on building the capacity of youth and emerging adults to engage in social recreation within their communities and helping build the capacity of caregivers and families to support their youth. We are helping develop the capacity of the existing social recreation providers to provide inclusive and adaptive opportunities for youth to engage with their community.
We are very proud of what we have done in a short period of time to serve a slightly different population with a slightly different focus. But one that is still aligned with our mission and our values.
Coordinated Family Support
We are getting ready to embark on a new journey with Coordinated Family Support (CFS) Services. This is a new, highly needed service in our communities. It is going to provide services to Individuals with disabilities in their family homes. It is going to provide the opportunity for us to go in and hire people who speak the same language and have the same cultural value system. It is an opportunity to serve an entire family, to make their quality of life better.
Individuals with disabilities who want to choose to live in their family home should get that option and be able to get a service that wraps around them in their own home. We are very excited about this and deeply feel it fits with our overall vision and mission. This is a new era for us and will again change our language to include more of our overall community.
Rebranding
We will be expanding our language and branding to include all these services. A huge part of who we are will always be SLS & ILS. It is in our roots and here to stay but we are making room for all these much-needed services to enrich the lives of those we serve and agencies that serve alongside us. We are changing our limitations and breaking out of the box we have been cozy in for many years. As we grow, we will continue to evaluate our language and tools and change is inevitable. As we look forward, we will not limit ourselves. We now have a bigger mandate to serve the community of individuals with disabilities, to serve agencies, and to provide and promote inclusivity to our community at large.