A house is a structure.
A home is a relationship.

Chapter 1

What Luv Michael Homes actually is.

Luv Michael Homes is an alternative residential model that began in Southampton, New York, in 2020. Three ordinary houses on ordinary streets. Nine adults on the autism spectrum, most with complex support needs, living in homes of four, three, and two with people they already knew. Support professionals hired by the families through New York's self-direction program. A church partner that gives the days a center. Community classes taught by working teachers. A clinical team that trains everyone who walks through the door.

Our org chart is a circle, not a pyramid. The residents sit at the center. Around them are the support professionals, then the families, then the clinical team, then the community, and only at the outer edge the founder and the executive director. Every decision gets tested against the middle of the circle. If it does not make a resident's day safer, healthier, or more joyful, it waits.

Who will be there for my child when I am no longer here? Everything we build is an answer to that question.

Chapter 2

The building comes second.

Start with classes, not a house

We did not start this way. If we were starting again, we would: with a community classes program run with a faith-based partner, so families could meet each other and their adult children could build a friendship circle over months before anyone talked about bedrooms. The roommates matter more than the rooms. Our residents knew each other for years before they lived together: from classes, from a decade of birthday parties, from Saturdays at the beach. A home of people who like each other is stable in a way a home of strangers never is.

So the first two questions are not about real estate. Who are the churches in your area? Would one of them consider offering community classes as a way to start bringing families together? That is step one. The house comes after the circle exists.

Buy within walking distance of the center

Our three homes sit near each other and near the church that anchors the days, close enough that the residents can walk there. Distance is a staffing cost, a transportation cost, and a safety question. A house ten minutes farther away is a house that needs another car and another driver every single day.

The house is the family's

In our model a patron family finances the home, and the nonprofit runs the program inside it under a written agreement. That structure needs lawyers on both sides, an independent review, and written answers to the questions nobody wants to ask: what happens when a resident moves on, when a family's circumstances change, when the house needs a new roof, when the founder is gone. Write those answers down before anyone moves in. The hardest year is the one you plan for now.

Design for calm

Predictable rooms. A visual schedule where everyone can see it (we use a wall display that shows each resident's morning checklist). Lighting and sound that can be turned down. A quiet room that belongs to no one. A kitchen built for teaching, not just for cooking, because someone is going to learn to make an omelet in it.

Move in slowly

Once the circle exists and the house is real, the onboarding still goes slowly: time in the house during the day, then a first overnight when the behavior analyst says the person is ready, not when the calendar says so. It can take the better part of a year. Nobody has ever regretted going slowly.

Chapter 3

The support professionals are the key to everything.

This is the part of the model people underestimate, and it is the part we spent our conference session on. A safe house needs systems. A meaningful home needs extraordinary people. Here is how we find them, train them, and try to keep them.

Finding the right person is a job in itself

1. Post on Indeed. One of our parents takes the lead screening the candidates who come in. Sharing the administrative burden with families is how the model stays affordable.
2. A preliminary Zoom call. About half never show. The ones who do usually have real potential.
3. An in-person interview, 45 minutes, with a parent and a leader. Again, about half no-show. Those who arrive are very likely to be referred on.
4. Referral to the fiscal intermediary for fingerprinting, background checks, and formal hiring. Two weeks at best, six at worst. Tell candidates that up front.
5. Your own background check, so a promising person can observe and train safely while the formal process runs.

Budget for the hidden cost: parent time, leadership time, missed interviews, and a long onboarding. None of it appears on a self-direction budget line, and all of it is real.

Hire for character, then train for skill

Training has to live where the work happens

Written materials and required trainings help. They are no substitute for observation, modeling, coaching, and feedback after a hard moment. Three things carry the weight for us:

• A clinical foundation. Our board-certified behavior analyst grounds every staff member in what autism can look like in adulthood, the common challenges, the strategies that help, and what can inadvertently trigger anxiety or agitation.
• Time on the ground. She travels to Southampton and stays about a day and a half at a time, observing all nine residents and the professionals who support them, in the actual environment.
• Tuesday evening staff training, on a topic that affects the whole community and was usually prompted by something that actually happened the week before.

One more rule: one team, nine residents. A staff member may be assigned to one person, but everyone is expected to be able to support everyone. Every staff member knows every resident's preferences, communication style, triggers, safety plan, what works, and boundaries. Shared knowledge is part of safety, and it is part of culture.

The honest part

Self-direction lets us pay roughly ten dollars an hour more than many certified settings. That is an advantage, and it still trails what a highly skilled person can earn in private pay. Staff in a self-directed model may have fewer benefits than a full-time agency employee, less paid time off, and less job security: if a claim is made, a person can be suspended without pay while an investigation runs, sometimes for weeks. Hiring is slow. And the people who can succeed with our most complex residents would be paid far more anywhere else.

People stay because of the attachment to the residents, the satisfaction of seeing progress, and the feeling that the work means something. Mission alone is not a retention strategy, so we recognize great work out loud, celebrate it, support people when the work is hard, and provide monetary support when we can. Photos, messages, and regular updates to families are part of it too: they ease a parent's anxiety and build the trust that keeps everyone in the room.

Our hope, and our ask of every funder and legislator who will listen: direct support professionals paid at least $35 an hour, with benefits, real job security, and dedicated funding for the training and supervision that happen beside the resident, not only the hours billed to them. When the workforce becomes stable, quality of life becomes stable.

Chapter 4

Who pays, honestly.

A home like ours runs on three sources of money, and the model only works when everyone can say out loud which source pays for what.

Self-direction, in plain English

1. The budget. The person, with their family, gets a person-centered budget and chooses services and vendors. Budgets vary widely by person and by state. Plan for a range, not a jackpot.
2. The fiscal intermediary. A state-approved organization administers the money and pays staff and vendors. In New York the program is OPWDD Self-Direction; more than 1.5 million Americans self-direct services across all fifty states.
3. The broker. A support broker helps the family build the plan and keeps it inside the rules. Find a good one before you find a house.
4. The two questions to ask any fiscal intermediary: can a participant's budget fund support hours in a private home shared with other participants, and what do families need to provide to make that work?

Program names and rules change. Verify everything with your state's developmental disabilities agency and a qualified fiscal intermediary before you plan around it. The national lookup is in the links at the bottom of this page.

Chapter 5

The days need a center.

A home with nowhere to go in the morning is a very expensive place to be lonely. Our answer is a church. Yours might be a library, a farm, a YMCA, a school, or a studio. What matters is a place that expects your residents every morning and knows them by name.

The church

The Dormition of the Virgin Mary Greek Orthodox Cathedral is our partner, in an interdenominational spirit. Most weekday mornings our residents are there together, in classes run in the cathedral's space, at lunch, and in the life of a congregation that has learned, in their words, how to give gifts of love, acceptance, and forgiveness. A faith community brings something a program cannot buy: hundreds of people who have decided, in advance, to be kind.

Community classes

If we could start over, this is where we would begin, long before the first house. Indigo Life Classes, the education arm of Luv Michael, runs small-group classes for adults 21 and over: movement, music, art, culinary, wellness, taught by working teachers, same day, same time, same teacher. The classes are open to anyone in the community who wants to take them. Our residents take them alongside dozens of other young adults from the East End, which means they have friends who do not live with them, and their families have met each other long before anyone needs a favor. Families pay through self-direction budgets or privately.

Meaningful work

Our residents hand-make the friendship bracelets that thank Luv Michael's donors, with real coworkers and a real shipping deadline. A member of our team who is himself on the spectrum greets guests, handles administration, and teaches a class. Work is not a reward for growth. It is where growth happens.

Families

Every family joins a Tuesday evening call. Staff send photos and updates. Parents share the administrative load, from screening candidates to organizing events. The families are not customers of the model. They are the model.

And once a year, we gather everyone: this conference, and the next morning, Surfers Healing at Ponquogue Beach.

Chapter 6

Prevention beats reaction.

When anxiety escalates, it can lead to distress behaviors, including self-injury. Reacting after someone is already overwhelmed is the most expensive and least effective thing a home can do. So the clinical work in our model happens before the hard moment, and it is written down.

• A behavior analyst who knows everyone. Every resident, every staff member, every house. Board certified, in the building regularly, and reachable in between.
• Behavior support plans, followed the same way every time. Consistency is kindness. A plan that three staff members run three different ways is not a plan.
• The ABC habit. Shift notes record what happened before, the behavior itself, and what happened after. Facts, not interpretations. Patterns become visible within weeks.
• A medical reviewer on the admissions committee. Our admissions decisions are made by a committee: the behavior analyst, the founder, the executive director, and a medical reviewer who looks at each candidate's health picture. Decisions follow a defined trial period with checkpoints, and they are made together.
• A protocol of record for each resident. Contacts, medications, communication, what calms, what escalates, what a good morning looks like. Written so that a successor caregiver could pick it up tomorrow. This is the document that answers the question at the top of this page.