Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers (RRTC) on Health and Function and Individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (I/DD)

This project seeks to build upon efforts to strengthen a community-academic partnership aimed at improving health status and physical activity for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Engaged partners in this collaborative include Kentucky’s University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities – the Human Development Institute (HDI) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). The HDI and UIC have worked together for the past four years to offer evidence-based health promotion opportunities to individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities who are served by provider agencies in Kentucky. We have identified agencies/networks around the state that are engaged in health promotion efforts at an organizational level. The power of the collaboration is that it addresses and ameliorates the disconnect between academia and community organizations, instead, harnessing the strategies utilized by these entities to enable statewide scale-up of efforts. A combination of stakeholder engagement and purposeful planning, input from the community, information sharing through training opportunities and resource development will ultimately result in increased opportunities and knowledge that will positively impact health outcomes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the Commonwealth of Kentucky.