Easter Seals Maine Inc

Easter Seals Maine (ESME) was opened in Portland, ME in 2003 to respond to a critical local need for early intervention services for infants and children birth to age three with disabilities or special needs. Since its inception 18 years ago, ESME has expanded to meet the needs of children, young adults, and adults from Maine, including veterans, service members, and their families.The goal of Easter Seals Maine is to ensure all services provide an individualized approach to infants, children, and adults with disabilities or special needs, including veterans, service members, and their families, while providing additional supports to their families. We accomplish this goal by fulfilling our objective to fill identified gaps in services and working with community partners to ensure that we are not duplicating, but rather leveraging, existing resources.Easter Seals Maine currently offers the following programs in support of Maine's families:Community Care Coordination: This program, made possible through a partnership with Anthem, provides Care Coordination services for individuals through a practical, holistic, and person-centered approach designed to maximize individual engagement in community support systems and prevent costly crisis intervention. The Easterseals Care Coordination model utilizes an empirically supported methodology rooted in positively impacting the social determinants of health. The result is improved individual functioning, and reduced health care costs for each participant.Targeted Case Management / Child Development Services and Outpatient Services: This program provides services for youth who meet the criteria for a chronic health condition or mental health diagnosis, such as autism. Easterseals case managers assist families in developing, coordinating, and monitoring a comprehensive support plan to help address the child's unmet needs.Military and Veteran Services:Our mission is to provide critical and timely financial assistance and care coordination when no other resource is available to veterans, service members, and their families, to ensure their dignity, health and overall well-being. MVS has grown to serve veterans of all eras including those with considerable barriers to self-sufficiency due to PTSD, TBI, and other wounds of war. The program has been successful in serving a hard-to-engage population and helping them achieve critical outcomes such as access to mental health care (including suicide prevention), linkage to needed services and benefits, meaningful employment, stable housing, and financial self-sufficiency. The program fills gaps in services by connecting veterans to Government, VA and social service systems and providing needed services that are not available through these other programs before, during, and post-deployment. Unique to our program is our ability to meet in the home and to address whatever problems emerge, regardless of a veteran's discharge status or other potential obstacles. Emergency Financial Assistance is paired with Care Coordination to provide a "hand-up" in the context of a plan for self-sufficiency.In December 2021, Easter Seals Maine, Inc, after much deliberation, we discontinued all program services.