Education & Empowerment, Inc. was formed in 2013, with the belief that there are a number of wonderful service providers and programs operating in Polk County Florida, that share our mission of providing supports and services designed to promote life-long learning, empowering people with disabilities to achieve their full potential. Education & Empowerment’s vision for realizing our mission is to create synergistic partnerships with new and existing service providers to develop a more dynamic, efficient system of services for/with people with disabilities.
We seek to support and/or partner with organizations to: expand their level of service provision, reap the benefits of shared resource systems and gain access to philanthropic funding. With the addition of these support opportunities, partnering organizations can continue to focus on providing quality services as well as expand their operations to serve more people with disabilities and create more employment opportunities within our community.
Education & Empowerment’s first partnership began with an existing, successful Polk County service provider through the creation of the Success for All Adult Day Training (SFA-ADT) program located with Dundee. We have been incredibly fortunate to partner with Success for All of Florida, Inc. in order to actualize our vision of providing supports and services to/with people with disabilities.
Fast forward about 3 years and here we are.
Education & Empowerment and Success for All are reshaping our partnership to realize the full benefits of being a non-profit, 501(c)3 agency. We are looking forward to this new adventure and we would like to invite you to join us on our journey.
sabilities a “forever” home if that is what they want. We can also provide a “for now” home if their future plan involves a few stops before they get to their “forever” home living situation. Either way, we strive to make our group homes safe, secure, healthy, supportive and comfortable for the people living there. We endeavor to support people to experience their community as an active participant, not an observer. We ensure that we find genuinely caring staff people that we train well. We expect staff to treat everyone with dignity, respect and provide an abundance of choice making opportunities as we believe every moment of every day is an educational opportunity. We also believe that Individual needs come first, always.
Our Adult Day Training (ADT) programs are based on the same founding principles. Our meaningful day curriculum was developed with large concepts including, but not limited to, educational skill development, social skills development, disaster preparedness, personal management and coping skills development, nutritional education, health and wellness best practices, community awareness, self-advocacy and self-determination.
icant barriers to healthy living. Many people we serve, their families and a number of our staff’s families, experience “food hardships” on a daily basis. As a result, we became an active Feeding America partner through the Agape Food Bank enabling us as an authorized point of contact, to distribute prepared food box’s for the benefit of people with disabilities within Polk County.
In May, 2016, we implemented our Health and Wellness program to help people with disabilities experience improved access and support to increase their healthy lifestyle choices based on knowledge and experience as well as reduce obesity and other secondary health conditions. In our first three months (baseline), 80.9% of the people we serve have achieved positive progress toward their IBW range. One person lost 5.8 lbs. another has gained 8.4 lbs., both are now within their IBW range. The most significant loss is 9.1 lbs. 57% of people we support have decreased their blood pressure (BP). 19% people reporting chronic high blood pressure have been able to lower their BP to within the normal range.
self-employment services (CBTAC) through the Florida Dept. of Vocational Rehabilitation. We are in the process of developing how we can best support people with disabilities to obtain an individualized job situation that will best suit their abilities, their targeted income plan, and what they actually want to do instead of what is available for them to do.
We are very fortunate to have found a great mixture of staff people that genuinely care, are passionate about learning and teaching new things, have the desire to support people with a disability to become who they want to become and are really great to be around.
