Aligning School & Community Resources
This topic explores how state agencies and local communities can
align and leverage all the resources communities offer to support
young people with disabilities and their families.
Introduction
Many community resources are available to support youth with disabilities and their families. Attempts have been made in communities across the country to convene interagency teams that work to coordinate these services, but coordination has been difficult to achieve.
Coordination of resources is difficult to achieve for many reasons,
including complications in agency eligibility criteria, difficulties in
convening interagency meetings, lack of agreement between agencies, and lack of commitment to addressing specific community and student needs. Often resources are unknown or underutilized by schools and organizations that serve youth with disabilities. Because of this, far too many youth with
disabilities do not receive the full benefit of the services and supports
available within their communities.
There are a number of different methods for identifying such resources,
including resource mapping, community asset mapping, and youth mapping. All methods follow a similar process. This Web topic focuses on resource
mapping, which is a process for identifying and aligning all resources. It
is a process or method by which a community's capabilities and capacities
are utilized to build a system. It reveals the resources and assets of the
entire community and highlights the interconnections among them. Many states and local communities--both urban and rural--as well as the federal
government have started to map and align resources to better serve young
people and more effectively meet education, workforce development, and
economic development goals.
Resource mapping is a tool that can be used to build relationships among various community agencies, organizations, businesses, and people at the local, state, and federal levels. It also helps foster relationships between
schools and community service agencies by focusing on the strengths rather
than the deficits of the community, and thus, building its capacity.
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