Quality Mall

The Quality Mall website has been taken down. For the past twenty years, the Quality Mall has shared the best in resources related to person centered supports for people with disabilities. It was developed at a time when the web had little such information, and what was there was of varying quality and hard to find. The idea for the Quality Mall gr... ew from a booklet of resources that Gary Smith ( Human Services Research Institute ), Bob Gettings ( National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services ), and Bob Prouty and Charlie Lakin ( Institute on Community Integration ) put together for the first Reinventing Quality Conference in 1991. In 2000, the Administration on Developmental Disabilities provided a seed grant to create the Quality Mall website, resurrect the Reinventing Quality Conference, and conduct case studies of exemplary programs. ICI built, managed, and maintained the website with support from national content experts who served as store and department managers in the virtual mall. The fact that the Quality Mall, and Reinventing Quality, were sustained for decades after that grant is a credit to the commitment and voluntary engagement of so many wonderful people. The world of searching the web has improved greatly since we started Quality Mall and the resources required to make it valuable in new ways would be akin to launching a new website. We explored this option seriously, but could not commit the resources required to sustain such an effort. The Quality Mall has been an important resource in assuring all people with IDD had access to the information that pushed organizations and systems to become more person-centered. Before Google became ubiquitous, Quality Mall provided access to needed information in a way no one else did.Read More