Transcript
What inspires you from WFSU public media? Here's this week's Voices That Inspire. I'm Kim Galbong Countryman and I'm the Executive Director of Independence Landing. Independence Landing is in this area, the first permanent supportive of affordable housing for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We provide supports on site so that they can live independently. Our motto is see where independence has landed. One way that people are independent is through employment. So we have taken on the employment opportunities for not just our residents, but other people in the community and one of the ways to increase employment was to purchase red eye coffee, which will eventually have a training center for adults with disabilities. But also we have a bakery on site and those two were just so complimentary that it seemed like a really good fit. The residents are what really inspire me. The way they have adapted to living independently, the way they're showing off meals that they've cooked, the way they've decorated their homes every day. They come to me with something new and it's hard to explain because there's so much of it going on, so much independence being learned. It's what keeps me going. Some of them get so frustrated because they've been underestimated their entire lives by people and they're finally in a place where they're not underestimated. We have one individual where their own family thought, well we're gonna have to live there, you know, probably for the first month. I'm like, yeah, that's against the rules you can't do that. Well, just don't even look. Just look the other way. Within a couple weeks, he was like, go home. I'm here, I'm home. And they had no idea that it was gonna happen that quickly. He was more independent than they thought he was and he's doing great. This is Kim Galbong-Kuncherman, executive director of Independence Landing. Come see where Independence has landed and maybe grab a cup of coffee at Red Eye Coffee. You're listening to voices that inspire.