For decades, the HCBS has made promises of everyday lives and lived experiences outside the abusive, degrading confines of state institutions and State Schools. Those promises were to be kept by designing and implementing a service delivery system that is structured and predicated upon the foundations of person-centered thinking and planning, self-direction, and that honors and respects the dignity and rights of all human beings, regardless of variations in form and function. The cornerstone of that promise is Support Coordination.  It is a standing component in the HCBS system of 48 states throughout the country. Support Coordination is the linchpin that connects HCBS program participants and their families with the services mentioned above. Supports Coordination is also the mechanism through which the supports and services provided through the HCBS system are monitored for efficacy and utilization. Moreover, support coordination serves as the oversight vehicle through which cost containment is achieved. Equally as important is support coordination that is relied upon for the development of the plan through which participants will achieve their everyday life, and to monitor and ensure the ongoing health and safety of participants in the waiver program.

The NOIRE Research Center on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities is guided by the belief that Support Coordination is the most critical component of the HCBS system. Sadly, the role of the support coordinator is simultaneously unheard and marginalized. It is the expressed aim of the Research Center on IDD through is SC Knowledge Area to highlight the significant role that supports coordination plays within the HCBS system and bring the voice of supports coordinators into the academic literature as subjects sharing their experience, as researchers driving the discovery of what is working and not working and as scholar practitioners at the forefront of the development of new knowledge in field of Human Services and IDD. Through this exposure, NOIRE hopes to bring the voice of the support coordinator into policy rooms, boardrooms, and legislative halls as subject matter experts.

Among the theoretical foundations informing the work of NOIRE’s Knowledge Area on Support Coordination is the 2018 study, In-Home Supports for the Developmentally Disabled Population: A Heuristic Phenomenological Study of SC’s Experiences, sought to understand how support coordinators who worked in the HCBS system supporting people with IDD understood their role and saw their positionality within a system that was held up by the work in which they were engaged daily. As a unique exploratory study, the themes identified by research participants themselves shed light on a system of supports through a voice that had not been heard in the academic literature to that point. The primary themes uncovered by the study include poor pay, newly hired SCs who are ill-prepared for the job of being an SC and working in a system that is not as person-centered as it purports to be, devaluing the people who help make the system work, the support coordinators.

The study has broad and deep implications for social change, including, but not limited to, reshaping the learning process for support coordinators, re-evaluating how person-centeredness is measured system-wide, and the professionalization of the support coordinator role.  By professionalizing the role of support coordinator, NOIRE firmly believes that support coordination is a unique service intervention, separate and distinct from case management, a term often used interchangeably. The nature and context of support coordination should be shaped by its theoretical base and model framework. NOIRE, through the IDD research center, works diligently towards this end. We believe that support coordination is the leverage point in HCBS and can serve as a bridge to restoring dignity and human value in human service delivery.