Newsletter for June/July 2009 The newsletter for those served by Sunflower, their families, staff, and many supporters.

Ladeska Makings
Director of Adult Services/COO
We hope you saw the articles in the local papers with pictures of Sunflower’s self-advocacy group as they prepared for and attended the Interhab Push Day in Topeka.  This day was designed to show our legislature that there is a very large group of individuals with developmental disabilities that are either underfunded or are among the nearly 4,000 Kansans waiting for services.  You will find several pictures in this newsletter of Sunflower’s self-advocacy group who joined hundreds of others wearing t-shirts that asked “Do you see me now?” in an attempt to insure that there were no more “Invisible Kansans”.  We’re very proud of our staff and especially of those we serve who were undeterred by the bad weather and advocated not only for themselves but for all Kansans with developmental disabilities.  Our gratitude to all the families, staff and friends of Sunflower that made calls, wrote letters and sent emails to their legislators asking for adequate funding.  Thanks also to Amanda for all her hard work to organize and make this trip a success.

 A few highlights from the past two months:

· Community employment staff have been very successful in placing individuals in the community.  See the story of one man inside.

· We celebrated Earth Day in conjunction with the county for the first time this year.  They provided the opportunity to recycle HHW, E-Waste and old bicycles at First Step.  Thanks to the sponsors of the coloring contest - TLC Discoveries, Bass X and Dance by Design.  We also thank KHOK for sponsoring a contest ad giving away this year's Sunflower Earth Day T-shirts.

· Sunflower was fortunate to be one of only a few General Public Transportation providers to receive federal stimulus dollars that will be used to cover the portion of purchase expense that is not covered by KDOT for our next three new vans.

· CHS staff took several individuals to the Salina Arts Center and all enjoyed the trip very much.

· Participated in the Job Olympics again this year providing several judges and sponsoring/operating the concession stand.

· Our new RN, Nancy Winkelman, has already become a great asset to the agency as she implements effective procedures and oversight methods as well as numerous other nursing tasks and providing medication administration and other medical related training to staff.

· Several training opportunities will be available to our management and staff as we make equipment preparations to access Webex and other on-line classes in our training and conference rooms.  CS coordinators have also been attending numerous educational meetings and as a result have been able to implement some very useful procedures.

· We participated in the Great Bend Job Fest and met a number of people interested in becoming a part of this field.  Over thirty applications were completed at the event.

· Our residential coordinators, day coordinator and medical services coordinator have all recently attended several training sessions of disaster preparedness.  They are also in the process of completing several FEMA provided on-line certification courses to assist in the development of new more effective, comprehensive disaster response plans for our agency.  We are meeting on a regular basis and will soon have everything in place.

· We've welcomed some new people into our day and residential supports as well as assisting some in meeting long-term goals that included moving to a location in the state that is closer to family.
 
As promised we are responding to numerous requests to repeat some of the items I’ve written for previous newsletters about living an independent life and will be adding more information in the months to come about the history of services and issues people with development disabilities are currently facing.