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Dear Sensational SPDF Friend:
I was thinking about the 30–year history of the Sensory Processing Disorder Foundation the other day and suddenly found myself remembering all the places we’ve called home over the past 30 years. There have been a lot of them, and boy have they changed! Please join me for a little tour...
1977 – The seeds of the SPD Foundation were planted on a card table in the living room of the apartment where my husband Bill and I lived in Philadelphia. The US Public Health Service division of Maternal and Child Health ranked me first for a grant to develop the Miller Assessment for Preschoolers (MAP), but they needed a legitimate organization to send the money to. "Oh, I have an idea! Let’s create a non-profit foundation," said my husband Bill. So we submitted the paperwork to start a charity and went to work on the MAP, right there on the card table. If ever a mighty oak grew from an acorn, it was the organization that started there. We would occupy many more houses in the years to come, but we date the birth of the Sensory Processing Disorder Foundation from this event.
1979 – We received formal IRS designation as a non-profit charitable organization promoting research, education, and advocacy for developmental disorders, especially Sensory Processing Disorder. (It was called KID Foundation for "knowledge in development.") In a display of perfect timing, our daughter Nicole (now singer/songwriter Coles Whalen) was conveniently born in the three-month time slot between my work on the national pilot study and the national final editions of the MAP.
1980 – With Bill and baby Nicole, we moved back to my hometown of Littleton, Colorado (near Denver), and the Foundation moved into a file room of my dad’s law practice. It was just me, my dad’s files, a telephone, a folding chair and – oh, yeah. The card table.
Like a young family, for the next 14 years, the Foundation grew through a succession of ever bigger-and-better houses...
- The attic of an old house, where I personally put together and prepared shipments of all the MAP kits. Those rickety attic stairs were the worst for carrying up boxes of toy cars and the huge folding plastic charts for the Stepping Game!
- A concrete warehouse in west Denver, with an office cubicle out front and an assembly area in the warehouse behind the office for assembling the MAP kits. Pretty industrial, but it beat those stairs!
- A four-room office suite overlooking Interstate 25. Okay, it was a tacky suite in a cheap building, but at least it was "professional"! We now had full-time people working on the MAP and were putting on seminars. (See the "Teaching the world" story in this issue for details of that endeavor.) I was submitting grants to follow up all the children we had identified during the standardization and to find out whether the MAP was accurate in predicting which kids would need help later in school (it was). Oh, and I was working on my PhD. Who cared about the tacky offices? Not us! Then my lovely little baby girl, Marita, conveniently arrived just after I turned in my dissertation and, oh yeah, did I mention that I kept applying for funding?
- Class at last! The Denver Tech Center – In 1990, we finally moved into nice, professional digs. President Reagan had started the Small Business Innovation Research grant program so I started a for-profit business, Developmental Technologies to create an eligible recipient for funding that would allow us to keep working on developing assessments (sound familiar?). The for-profit started getting grants, and we were able to hire some people to help with the assessment development projects. (The First STEP, Toddler Infant and Motor Evaluation, and the revised Lieter International Performance Scale all resulted). I now was the proud "owner" of both a for-profit and a non-profit and guess what? I was still submitting grant applications right and left while traveling in my spare time to Washington University in St. Louis to teach one week a month in Carolyn Baum’s OT graduate program. At least the PhD was done!
- The law offices revisited. As an economy measure, we moved back to my dad’s law offices in Littleton but graduated from the file room. So what if my assistant was all the way on the other side of the building? I had a nice corner office and a dignified professional presence, and it all came with a family discount and a lovely mountain view.
1994 – After four years of commuting to St. Louis from Denver, I decided that I needed a new plan. After all, I had two kids, the Foundation, and my husband Bill at home. So I applied for a part-time job at the University of Colorado medical school in Denver. (Of course, it was part-time because I still had the Foundation to keep going). There, I developed an early identification project for the university-affiliated program, and I wrote grants.
1995 – A really big move: same space, new capabilities. The amazing and ever-generous Wallace Research Foundation funded us to create a psychophysiology research laboratory to study Sensory Processing Disorder (then still known as "sensory integration dysfunction") at the university. (Read more about the details of our research in Sarah Schoen’s History of Research at the SPD Foundation article). This was really the beginning of our work as it exists today. I started the Sensory Therapies and Research Center – STAR Center – to conduct research at the medical school and shuttled between there and my dad’s Littleton offices, where the Foundation was still based about 15 miles away.
2001 – Your homes became the Foundation’s homes away from home. The parent program now known as SPD-Parent Connections (see parent Carrie Fannin’s terrific Sensational Families story in this issue for the story) was started to provide support and education for families far and wide. Now the Foundation was at work not only in Denver but from the homes of a growing network of families everywhere.
2005 – Our current space in the Denver Tech Center. After I was unable despite my best efforts to land a big grant from the National Institutes of Health to fund more research, I needed to leave the medical school. So my research staff and I decided to leave together and continue the work elsewhere. We were able to take the STAR Center name, and it now belongs to the clinic I originated at the medical school. (For more about the STAR Center read Lynn Witzen’s STARLights column). The Foundation left the law offices, changed its name to the Sensory Processing Disorder Foundation (because everyone was asking about KID Foundation: What kind of kids?), and the two organizations became neighbors in several rented suites of a big redbrick building not so far from that tacky office we occupied years ago along Interstate 25. If you’re registered for our upcoming symposium featuring Dr. Winnie Dunn, you’ll be able to see our new home during Friday night’s reception and tour.
2011 – Okay, so 2011 isn’t in our history (yet). But it’s already on our calendar. That’s our target year to move the Foundation and the STAR Center to our very own freestanding building. I have dreams for our ultimate home. There are a couple of preschool/kindergarten classrooms, lots of therapy spaces, all with one-way mirrors for use in a myriad of education and mentoring programs that run year-round. There are at least two research laboratories so more than one project can be underway at a time and a big yard with shade trees so STAR can treat kids outside instead of under fluorescent lighting indoors. And, oh yes, I don’t want to forget: There are residential suites where families traveling to STAR Center for treatment or therapists coming for mentorship can stay.
In my dreams, we own this "house" instead of renting it, because rent is high when there’s no family discount, and renting doesn’t build equity.
It’s a big dream, I know. But why not? If there’s one thing that 30 years of history has taught us, it’s that there’s always room for growth, and the best is yet to come.
With warmest regards from our house to yours,
Lucy Jane Miller, PhD, OTR
Founder and Executive Director
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