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Open Doors for Multicultural Families 

Description

ODFM is dedicated to ensuring that families of loved ones with intellectual/developmental disabilities and special health care needs have equal access to culturally and linguistically appropriate information, resources and services. We promote culturally competent services through community collaboration, training, and partnerships. Major challenges the families face regularly are results of culture and language differences. They need culturally and linguistically responsive and appropriate support to access needed resources, services and information.   

Mission Statement
Open Doors for Multicultural Families is a nonprofit, charitable organization dedicated to ensuring that families who have family members with developmental disabilities and special health care needs have equal access to culturally and linguistically appropriate information, resources and services. We promote culturally competent services through community collaboration,
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Open Doors for Multicultural Families
4327 S 253rd St 
Kent 
WA
98032 
(206) 372-1072 

Ginger Kwan 
Executive Director 

Programs

Open Doors for Multicultural Families Programs

The purpose of  the Multicultural Community Parent Resource Center Program is to ensure that diverse families of children with disabilities receiving linguistically and culturally appropriate information, resources, and support to access services in order to achieve best family and child outcomes.

  1. To enhance capabilities of multicultural parents’ participation and involvement in school to support their children with disabilities achieving better education outcomes.
  2. To ensure youth with disabilities and their families are engaged in the transition to adulthood planning process.
  3. To increase social networking, experience sharing and problem solving among multicultural families who have children with disabilities.
  4. To assist in accessing information, resources, available services and benefits.
Multicultural Disabilities Network Program creates collaboration and partnerships among service professionals and community agencies to remove negative social stigma and negative perceptions of people of intellectual and developmental disabilities with backgrounds, bring positive images and perceptions of people with disabilities to the refugee and immigrant communities, create an inclusive community that embraces and is supportive to their needs.  The Program aims to increase capacity of network agencies and professionals to serve these families by conducting cultural competence training and increasing access to family centered services provided bilingual Family Support staff in the network.

Recent Successes and Current Challenges

One great success we are proud to share is our youth job readiness training pilot program that inspired 20 refugee and immigrant youth with disabilities to be better prepared for brighter future employment opportunities and higher education achievement.   From May to December 2012, these Chinese, Somali, Spanish, and Vietnamese speaking ELL students with disabilities, regularly attended our technology and job readiness training at STAR Center, our program partnering agency. Through our culturally and linguistically appropriate support and services, these youth have demonstrated great interests in learning technology and planning for their future and their parents who attended our parent workshops had become more actively engaged in their children’s education and pathway to employment planning.  Students attended the program were excited in learning new computer skills, creating resumes, conducting job search on lines, actively participating in team building activities.  Together, these youth engaged in producing a DVD that figured their future employment and education desires, dreams and goals.  Parents were reporting better communications with their children with disabilities and saw improvement in their children’s desires to learn new things.

This program motivated these youth to learn and grow independently, provided needed support for them to improve language and job readiness skills.  We have witnessed the positive impacts and outcomes through this pilot program.

Evaluation


Open Doors was established in 2009 by several families who all had a child with developmental disabilities and/or special medical needs and saw a gap in the current service delivery system. They realized that there was a major gap between culturally specific service organizations and organizations for the developmentally disabled. Today, Open Door’s focus is on ensuring that all families receive culturally appropriate services in the family’s native language, by people from their own communities.

Leadership
A significant feature of the organization is that the Executive Director and several board members have worked together in the Developmental Disabilities field for over 15 years. Their collective expertise, networks, and ability to work strategically puts the organization in a unique position for long term success. The Executive Director is regularly called on to provide consultation and training to organizations serving those with developmental disabilities on cultural issues, and to culture specific organizations on developmental disabilities.

Use of Best Practices
Open Doors is a Parent Center funded, modeled after, and supported by the Office of Special Education Program through the Federal Government. Because of this, Open Doors uses their formal evaluation, training, and technical assistance systems. Even though Open Doors is a fairly young organization, they have access to and utilize national best practice models.

Collaboration
Collaboration is a key component of Open Door’s business model. They have developed strong working relationships with the King County Disabilities Division, South King County school districts, and numerous local nonprofits serving culturally specific populations and families with a developmentally disabled child. Currently, Open Doors is utilizing funding through United Way to create a regional Multi-cultural Disabilities Network. The goal of the network is to bridge the gap between organizations for the developmentally disabled and culture specific organizations while increasing their capacity for better serving families.

Grant History with The Seattle Foundation:

Grants Awarded through The Seattle Foundation Grantmaking Program:

DateAmountPurpose
3/10/2013 $10,000.00support general operating expenses.

Financials

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