Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
After 60 years, the Elizabeth Richardson Center finds greatest necessity is caring for adults
One of the main reasons Bill Bowen moved to Northwest Arkansas from Philadelphia in 1976 was the Elizabeth Richardson Center.
“At that time there were better services [here] for folks with disabilities than in the Philadelphia area,” Bowen said. His daughter Tricia was a client with the Richardson Center for more than 42 years. She died in 2019 at the age of 50, but Bowen still serves on the ERC board of directors because, as he sees it, the people ERC serves are more than a community. They are a family.
The Elizabeth Richardson Center offers residential options and recreation for clients ages 18 and older with intellectual disabilities. It began, though, in the basement of First United Presbyterian Church in Fayetteville in 1963 with four students who were children.
Dr. Wade Burnside recruited Elizabeth Richardson, a recently widowed schoolteacher, to lead the program that was then focused on giving children with developmental disabilities a chance to learn, since special education wasn’t an option then.
By 1973 the program grew into a building at Woodland Avenue in Fayetteville serving more than 60 children from the region. As ERC added facilities for children, the rest of the U.S. started to catch up over the next three decades, but not with services for adults.
“A pediatrician on our board says she has no trouble finding resources for children, but for her teen and young adult patients it is much more difficult,” ERC Executive Director Kimberly A. Aaron said. As a result ERC has begun to focus soley on providing services to adults.
“ERC has always looked [for] the greatest need, and why fill in when somebody else can do that?” Bowen said.
Since 1987, ERC has operated a vocational center focused on job training and supporting clients in finding work. They also learn life skills such as balancing a budget, grocery shopping and other skills at the Life Skills Center.
In 2001, ERC opened Richardson Industries in Springdale, which provides contract-based manufacturing services to businesses such as Walmart. Clients work in packaging, sorting and assembly.
One of the workers at Richardson Industries is board member Joanne Rhyne’s 37-year-old daughter Vicky, who has been with ERC for the last 18 years. She began working at Richardson Industries in high school.
“When she graduated, she was familiar with the work and the people and it just eased her transition,” Rhyne said. “She loves coming to work. If she’s sick, she doesn’t want to stay home.”
It’s not just work though, Vicky plays sports through ERC too.
“We have a softball team and a basketball team,” Aaron said. “This last year was the first [time] we had a basketball team, but we’ve done some softball, and we participate in the track and field sports in Special Olympics.”
The sports programs, Aaron said, were added in the 1980s with the Special Olympics. The clients also participate in unified sports with teams made up of Special Olympic athletes and non-Special Olympic athletes.
“We actually have volunteers that work with [us] in that regard,” Aaron said. “All of those just really help our people learn to integrate … and learn the things that people do out in the larger community.”
In 1988 ERC opened its first group homes and has since added more that are staffed 24 hours a day with medical oversight. With the medical staff available, the adults still have a bit of independence.
Bowen explains that many adults with disabilities suffer the same sort of health challenges as their parents. He saw with his own daughter.
One of the biggest challenges they face these days come in the form of Medicaid funding both to ERC and its clients, which Aaron said has not kept up with the rate of inflation.
“The amount that we get paid to run those facilities has not increased more than pennies since 2013,” Aaron said. “[For] our day programs here, the state has not increased reimbursements since 2019.”
ERC’s Waiver program offers clients support in housing, finding benefits such as SNAP or rental assistance (HUD); securing specialized equipment for medical needs and others such as transportation, assistance with moving and more.
“With the waiver program, which is our program out in the community, they have not increased reimbursements since 2020,”
Aaron added. “The biggest nut to crack is, ‘How do we continue to operate whenever we’re being reimbursed to serve people based on an economy that was completely different than it is today?’”
Another issue that directly affects the clients is recent changes to Medicaid that have caused some to lose services.
“We see people that have been served with us with a developmental disability for 10, 12, 15 years, that are losing their Medicaid,” Bowen said.
Many times ERC isn’t even aware that the services have dropped because of delays in processing paperwork.
“So we’ll have $20,000 to $30,000 of services invested in a person and the state refuses to pay us back because they say they’re not covered any longer,” Aaron added. “A lot of people became eligible for Medicaid during covid as a safety net, and now they’re supposedly sorting through those and dropping people.”
Rhyne said that she’s currently going through this very issue with her daughter who was on Medicaid before covid.
“From what I understand [she received payments from] one pot of Medicaid, then she became eligible for Social Security instead of SSI (Supplement Security Income), so she’s supposed to get from a different pot of Medicaid,” Rhyne said. “In April, they said ‘We’re starting over.’ So I had to reapply.”
It’s been a runaround ever since: they then extended it into June, giving her new paperwork to fill out; then they extended it to Nov. 30, hence more paperwork to fill out with a due date of Dec. 2.
Rhyne’s story is common for many of the clients at ERC, Aaron said. She points to one of the men working in the Richardson Industries facilities who just lost his benefits.
“We’ve served him for five or six years,” Aaron said. “We got notice yesterday that his Medicaid was terminated on Nov. 7. Yesterday was Dec. 4, so we’ve been serving him for a month. We can’t get paid for that. We have five people right now that have been turned from Medicaid. All of them we’ve served for years, nothing has changed in their diagnosis.”
Thankfully, she said that the board’s policy allows ERC to keep clients on for 30 days while staff seeks a solution.
“At the end of the 30 days, we have to call their families or their guardians and say, we can’t serve them any longer,” Aaron said.
In the meantime, ERC leans on the community for support.
“We’re really trying to build philanthropy and what we really need is more engagement from the community to support the work that we’re doing financially,” Aaron said. Even if someone can’t donate money, she says there’s many ways to volunteer your time.
“We do need volunteers to help engage with our folks like through our sports programs,” she said. “Our folks would love an art class or a pottery class or something like that.”
Aaron said that the clients love visitors too.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for them to build their communication skills and increase their comfort in interacting with new people.”
Finally, the ERC needs advocates.
“The other thing we really need is for people to come and see what we’re about and then be our voice in the community,” Aaron said. “We need advocates that are talking about what we do and the impact that we’re having because we’ve been around for 60 years, and there’s still gets to be a lot of confusion about who we are and what we do.”
Monica Hooper is a features writer and podcast host for the NWA and River Valley Democrat-Gazette. She loves sharing stories about artists, dancers, music makers and all sorts of interesting folks. She can be reached at mhooper@nwaonline.com. Read the stories at nwaonline.com/staff/monica-hooper.