New Community For Adults With Developmental Disabilities

Damar Services is reaching to serve more adults with disabilities that rely on low-income housing. Its new Damar Village is under construction and received funding to include therapeutic, sensory landscaping throughout the residence.

WFYI’s Terri Dee spoke with President and CEO Dr. Jim Dalton about plans for the new community and its strategy to use sensory experiences help people with developmental disabilities. Damar Services was founded to help children, and Dalton said the new Damar Village is part of its more recent move to include adults.

Transcript: 

Damar Village President and CEO Jim Dalton: Over the last 10 years, Damar has seen the need for support services for adults has just been growing significantly for a couple reasons. One is the incidence of autism and developmental disabilities continues to rise. The other issue that we're facing as a society and as a nation, is that people with developmental disabilities are actually living a lot longer than they ever have before.

There's just such a great need to serve the adult population and one of the crisis areas has been adult and low-income housing. While we have seen many of the people that we've served living in their own communities, many times, in these communities, they experience isolation and even rejection, and they're spending a lot of their dollars on housing with very little dollars left for quality of life.

So Damar and our board of directors decided, we're in a position now where we're going to help solve that problem or at least make a dent in them. So, we’ve developed the concept of the Damar Village, which ultimately will be about 150 individuals with developmental disabilities, but not all developmental disabilities, because this is a community that is open to the public. But it's designed specifically to meet the needs of adults that need some kind of integration and need therapeutic supports, they need services, they need integration in the community, transportation and support.

So, it's one of the most exciting projects that we have ever embarked on and our board of directors in our community could not be more excited.

WFYI Reporter Terri Dee: Let's talk about the grant by the Allen White Hill Clowes Charitable Foundation for sensory landscaping at the Damar Village adult living complex. Explain what the sensory landscaping is, what it will do and how it will impact Damar Village.

Dalton: We have looked at the needs of living situations for adults with developmental disabilities, and what we have done is we’ve built, into this community, many opportunities for sensory integration for therapeutic support. So, what you'll find through our community is wonderful sand structures where adults and their families can enjoy the kind of texture of feeling of that and the experiences they'll have with that.

We'll have beautiful bamboo forests that make these beautiful noises when the wind comes through them. We'll have water features that also give a lot of sensory experiences. So, this helps with sensory integration, it also has a calming impact. And, you know, quite frankly, they're just beautiful structures.

One of the things that we wanted to make sure is that Damar Village is such a high quality, beautiful place, and the Clowes Charitable Foundation has certainly helped us achieve that.

Dee: Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today.
 

Dalton: Thank you.

The adult living complex is under construction on the southwest side of Indianapolis with an expected opening in spring 2021. The sensory landscaping is funded by a recent Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation grant of $100,000.