| Mar 29, 2012


Photo: Don Nielson, outgoing executive director of Community Living.

When Don Nielsen took over the helm of Community Living - North Frontenac in 1994 from Paul Melcher, the agency, and the province, were in the middle of a huge transition from an institutional care model to a community support model for the developmentally disabled population.

This transition to a community model was something that Nielsen had been committed to ever since he began working as an outreach worker for the St. Lawrence Regional Centre in Brockville in 1976, so the opportunity to steer the service model in Central and North Frontenac in a new direction was one of the things that led him to seek the executive director position at the time.

At that time Community Living was based in Mountain Grove at ARC industries.

ARC industries was becoming difficult to maintain because of financial pressures and as well a number of the people who worked at ARC were ageing.

“We also found we were spending a lot of time, and money, transporting people from the communities they were living in to ARC industries and back home,” said Nielsen.

In the late 1990s Community Living moved its office to Sharbot Lake, in a small office building at the junction of Highway 7 and Road 38. They would later move to a house on Elizabeth Street, which was eventually destroyed by fire and replaced with a building on the same lot.

For Nielsen, all of the physical and corporate changes to Community Living have been secondary to the concept of community-based service and his deep-seated opposition to institutional care.

“We provide support for people who have needs, but there are a lot of people in our society who have needs but are not in institutions. All of our clientele live in their own homes. We are not the landlord. Whether we provide 24 hour a day care or 6 hours of service a week, we always knock on the client's door when we want to enter their home. We take off our shoes. They decide whether to let us in or not,” he said.

Another change that has been a feature of Community Living – North Frontenac under Don Nielsen has been the development of children’s services, which has been good not only for the community but for the viability of the agency as well.

One of the major features of the job of an executive director of a social service agency is dealing with sister agencies and government ministry officials. With contacts that he has developed over 37 years in developmental services, Nielsen has been able to put the interests of the clientele in Central and North Frontenac forward while following the various changes in policy and financing that have come along.

A couple of years ago Don Nielsen started to envision this week, when he would leave his job, and devote more time to his twin pursuits of curling and golf.

At that time he began planning for his retirement, and preparing the board of Community Living to undertake the process of re-shaping the agency in light of his pending departure.

In the end the board decided to replace Nielsen with an internal appointee, Dean Walsh and to hire Marcel Quenneville from Verona to take on Walsh’s former co-ordinator job.

“The board went through a process to find a successor, and over the last year Dean has undergone the training and other work that he needed in order to be able to take over. I’m confident that Community Living will do well,” Don Nielsen said.

 

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