Poster Presentations

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  Enhanced Behavioral Support Rooted in Human Rights

  Alan B. Cobo-Lewis and Sarah K. Howorth
  CCIDS
  2025

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  Navigating the Complex Early Childhood Systems of Care

  Ivy Foster
  2025

  Maine Parent Federation, Maine's statewide nonprofit that provides information and resources to families across to help them navigate the complex systems of care for children and youth with disabilities and special health care needs (CYSHCN). MPH also monitors state policy and supports advocacy efforts

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  Quality Early Care and Education Includes ALL Kids

  Shilo Johnson
  2025

  There has been an increased focus on inclusive practices in Maine for those who serve Early Childhood Education (ECE) and Out of School Time (OST) youth. Two professional development opportunities, the Maine Inclusion Credential and Inclusion Book Club (PLC) have reached professionals around the state. These offerings through Maine Roads to Quality-Professional Development Network (MRTQ-PDN) focus on increasing educator knowledge and skill and reflecting on attitudes and beliefs about inclusion in ECE and OST settings.

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  The Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Blueprint for Change Statewide Gap Analysis

  Alyssa Limeburner
  2025

  From spring 2024 to 2025, the Maine CDC conducted a statewide gap analysis to identify service needs for children and youth with special health care needs (CYSHCN) and their families. Guided by the Blueprint for Change—focused on health equity, family well-being, access, and service financing—the analysis revealed major gaps, including limited family support, poor care coordination, long wait times, and barriers for those utilizing public insurance. My role involved aligning these findings with national frameworks like the 2024 National Academies’ Roadmap, which echoed similar challenges and stressed the need for urgent, systemic change.

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  Is there less restraint and isolation of students after TCI quality improvement and fidelity assessment?

  Alan Cobo-Lewis and Alan Kurtz
  2023

  Cobo-Lewis and Kurtz tested the Quality Improvement and Fidelity Assessment Process (QIFAP) in Therapeutic Crisis Intervention (TCI) at residential and school settings to see whether QIFAP was associated with a drop in restraint and isolation of students.

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  Mind the Gap! Advancing Data Equity to Improve Population Health Equity for People with Disabilities

  Michelle Fong
  NH-ME LEND
  2023

  The Center for Community Inclusion and Disability Studies (CCIDS), Maine’s University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disability (UCEDD), carries out a variety of education and research activities designed to improve the social and health equity of people with disabilities (PWD). CCIDS sought to examine the health equity of Maine’s population with intellectual and neurodevelopmental disabilities (IDD/NDD) regarding Covid-19. However, we encountered a data gap. Therefore, we examined the drivers of data gaps for people with disabilities to make recommendations for improving their health equity by ensuring their representation in public health data, the evidence base for policymaking.

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  Connection Impacts Experience During Early Intervention and ELCO Process

  Gabriela Fuentes
  NH-ME LEND
  2023

  This partnership with the Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (MECDHH) led to a comprehensive understanding of program management and immersion in the Deaf community, providing insight into their unique cultural norms. The poster showcases the early intervention experiences of families and children through the Exploring Language Communication Opportunities (ELCO) process.

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  Promoting Mental Health in Schools

  Ashley Mulkern
  NH-ME LEND
  2023

  About 1 in 7 U.S. children aged 2-8 have a mental, behavioral or developmental disorder reported by a parent. The Maine CDC's Pediatric Mental Health Care Access Grant provides behavioral health consultation to pediatric primary care providers and training and support to schools by strengthening policies and programs in school mental health.

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  Adults With Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (IDD) as Role Models to Youth with IDD

  Abbott Philson
  NH-ME LEND
  2023

  This research project was to understand peer mentoring with people with disabilities.There are not a lot of opportunities for formal peer mentoring for youth with disabilities in Maine.

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  Artificial Intelligence in Social Work Practice

  Cat Sabourin
  Interdisciplinary Disability Studies and Social Work
  2023

  Although present in organizational contexts and potentially complimentary to professional outcomes, intelligent tools have not been widely embraced by social work. A growing literature has recognized the ubiquity of artificial intelligence and thus the critical need for social work to integrate these tools throughout the diversity of professional practice. Integrating disability studies, social work, and artificial intelligence methods, this poster presents the benefits of using AI in social work, and then illustrates, and evaluates a model of practice using extant data in which an intelligent AI robotic companion is used to further amplify social work intervention.

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  Thinking and Designing Beyond the Jig-Seating Reimagined

  Lily Watson
  Interdisciplinary Disability Studies
  2023

  Most chairs aren’t designed to serve human bodies. Enter, the impaired body, not simply as a source for treatment and revision but as a challenge to standard design. This poster presents an innovative chair redesign project. The effort was intended to enhance comfort and functionality as well as aesthetics of seating in public spaces.

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  Advancing a Universally Designed (UD) Curriculum: How NH-ME LEND is Creating an Accessible Program for All

  Susan Zimmermann, Amy Frechette, Kathleen Bates, Marnie Morneault, Stacy Driscoll, Susan Russell, and Betsy Humphreys
  NH-ME LEND
  2023

  To meet the recent requirement for LEND programs to develop a Self-Advocacy Discipline, faculty and staff members of the NH-ME LEND Program established a workgroup to consider how best to support trainees and faculty, including those with disabilities. The focus of the group evolved to include universally designed (UD) principles into the curriculum to accommodate the wide range of learning styles of all NH-ME LEND trainees.

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  Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing (MECDHH): Needs Assessment

  Hamda Ahmed
  NH-ME LEND Program
  2022

  MECDHH/GBSD has formed a collaborative partnership with several statewide agencies in Maine that serves children who are deaf or hard of hearing and their families. Early screening for children is necessary to provide them the right services. Based on research done in 2018, approximately one in three children did not receive any follow up testing and received no diagnosis. In addition, the social determinants of health plays a big role when it comes to service delivery knowing that Maine is mostly a rural area. In this presentation, we will focus on the activities and the needed priorities identified in the community.

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  A Study of Evidence Based Practice in Health Professional Education: Advantages and Dangers

  Elizabeth DePoy and Stephen F. Gilson
  2022

  Evidence-based practice is highly valued by health professionals for its predictive capacity. Yet, as affirmed by the NASDDDS/AUCD Evidence-Based Policy Initiative, this approach to health care may inadvertently contribute to inequity of access to health support services and policy. This study was conducted to examine how health professional faculty, students, and curricula understand and reconcile evidence-based knowledge with other valuable forms of knowing that support diversity and health equity.

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  Restoring Caregiver Health Through Story Stewardship

  Andrea Dole
  NH-ME LEND Program
  2022

  Parents and guardians of people with disabilities in the US often work overtime advocating, teaching, and leading in multiple arenas and systems for the human rights and dignity of their loved ones. These caregivers need safe spaces to be seen, listened to, and supported on a human level in their ongoing work. To provide quality, attuned care and model inclusion for their loved ones with disabilities, a caregiver must have spaces where they can experience that care and inclusion themselves. Peer-led restorative circles and story stewardship practices are promising models to provide mutual support, deep listening, and inclusion, in a structure that is inherently healing and power-sharing. This model would lend itself to further peer-led Grounded Theory research that centers the powerful lived-experiences of caregivers of people with complex disabilities in the US. Andrea Dole is a Social Work and Family Trainee from Maine in the NH-ME LEND (Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities) program. Andrea was paired with community organization FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder) Maine for the Leadership Placement component of the HRSA-funded 300 hour non-degree LEND program. The project was for the LEND Trainee to collaborate with FASD Maine to design a process for gathering stories from stakeholders. Emergent findings during the LEND program year and collaboration with FASD Maine Leadership Mentor Madonna Mooney, led to Andrea's research into ethical story-gathering practices, and an experiential pilot of the process. Andrea Dole is a restorative practitioner and parent to a child with special health care needs (CSHCN). This lived-experience informed the focus on restorative and story stewardship practices, and the interest in Grounded Theory research.

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  "Forensic Analysis" Thinking: Promoting Equity of Access for All Persons

  Stephen F. Gilson and Elizabeth DePoy
  2022

  While forensic analysis often conjures images of criminal justice investigation, it is actually a valuable and innovative analytic process to identify “what went wrong” as the empirical basis to inform creative repair and advancement. This poster presents an innovative forensic educational process and its evaluation in a disability studies curriculum which engages students in analyzing and advancing responses to unequal access in all arenas of health and welfare.

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  Collaboration to Empower Every Learner

  Shilo Goodhue
  2022

  A review of how two nonprofit agencies in Maine are collaborating with the creators of Empower the Learner, a student advocacy program, to make the materials accessible to students who are more significantly impacted by disability.

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  Collaboration to Empower Every Learner

  Shilo Goodhue
  NH-ME LEND Program
  2022

  The vision of Empower the Learner is that “Each child is unique and needs to be understood, valued and empowered to…..achieve agency, self-advocate for their learning and realize their hopes and dreams.” To support this, ETL has created a tool to help students recognize their strengths and learning challenges and express those to the educational team. The Maine Parent Federation and the Autism Society, with funding through the Maine Developmental Disabilities Council, joined with ETL to modify the program to make it accessible to children who are impacted more significantly by their disability. The goal is to not only empower ALL students but to promote and encourage reasonably higher expectations for children.

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  Co-creating Equity: Culturally Responsive Angolan New Mainer Pod Model Childcare for an Inclusive Health Community

  Marnie Morneault and Azenaide Pedro
  2022

  Lewiston, Maine is home to multiple refugee groups, including the Angolan New Mainer community. This poster describes a project to support co-creation of culturally responsive inclusive childcare settings. Maine UCEDD staff worked within the Angolan community utilizing culturally humble techniques to identify drivers and barriers for creating care settings, constructed solutions to barriers within systems, and provided support for equitable childcare as a component of a healthy community.

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  Take Action! Empowering Families of Children with Disabilities as Leaders in Advocacy and Policy Development

  Anita Tevanian
  NH-ME LEND Program
  2022

  Families of children with disabilities are at the forefront of advocating for positive change in their communities. The policy development process can be intimidating and at times seem like a foreign language. Through development of leadership skills and networking, families can translate their lived experience into actionable steps toward a goal of policy change for the benefits of the wider community. The framework presented here reflects my personal story of advocacy work with the foundation of families as meaningful partners.

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  The Process of Planning a Professional Conference

  Erin Wood
  NH-ME LEND Program
  2022

  Maine Educational Center for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing is planning a spring conference for parent and professionals to bring together and raise awareness of parents and professionals in the Deaf and hard of hearing community. They are taking family-based feedback of needs in the field and are using a conference to support those in this community and address those needs to a broad range of professionals and families.

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  Breaking Silos Through Narrative Advocacy

  Jennifer Maeverde
  2021

  My approach in forming and structuring this PLC sought to address barriers to authentic community building, cross sector collaboration, as well as creating a coherent, inclusive shared vision of health and well-being for children and families.

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  Considering Platforms for NH-ME LEND Program Delivery: Face-to-Face? Remote or Hybrid? Lessons Learned from the COVID-19 Pandemic

  Susan Russell and Betsy Humphreys
  NH-ME LEND Program
  2021

  In March 2020, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the NH-ME LEND Program transitioned all didactic, clinical, and leadership activities to a fully remote format. Initially program leadership and staff were concerned about the effects this change would have on overall program quality and trainee experience. As the pandemic persisted, it was clear that a fully remote program would be necessary during the 2020-2021 academic year. A first ever fully remote program year was completed in May 2021.

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  The Impact of Current U.S. Immigration Policies on Individuals with Disabilities and their Families

  Carolyn Coe
  New Hampshire-Maine Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities Program (NH-ME LEND)
  2020

  The Public Charge rule and the Remain in Mexico policy negatively impact individuals with disabilities and make it harder for legal immigration to the U.S. for low- and middle-income people. The Public Charge rule does not affect asylum seekers, but the Remain in Mexico policy results in a loss of protections for this population.

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  Inclusion/Services and Family Engagement: Leadership Opportunities

  Nicole Drown
  New Hampshire-Maine Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and Related Disabilities Program (NH-ME LEND)
  2020

  Project was created to provide: data driven materials to Maine's Child Development Services; resources and supports to families; and exploration into Applied Behavioral Analysis for Behavioral Intervention Support learning.