Samples / NURS FPX 4055 / Assessment 2
Assessment 2: Community Resources
NURS FPX 4055 · Assessment 2
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Community Resources
Nonprofits nationwide are vital contributors to the advancement of public health, safety and social equity. The Arc of the United States is the autism advocacy organization throughout the nation for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (The Arc, 2025). This report is a discussion about how The Arc mission, funding and community programs support and foster health, safety and opportunity in communities. If a nurse is aware of these contributions, he will be able to recognise potentially beneficial collaborations to improve health promotion beyond the clinical context.
Mission, Vision, and Contributions to Public Health and Safety
All successful nonprofits have a mission and vision that inform and direct their continued activities. The Arc's mission is to advocate and defend the human rights of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) (The Arc, 2025). Its vision puts people with IDD as the basis for full inclusion and participation in the community “all of the time” (The Arc, 2025). This mission and vision statement give the organization a definite direction in terms of program/service development.
The mission of the Arc provides for concrete public health and public safety benefits – beyond just advocacy statements. Individually, in people with IDD, the incidence of diagnosed anxiety and depression is almost 10 times as high as in those without IDD (Osuna et al., 2026). The mission of The Arc explicitly shines a light on these documented mental health disparities (Osuna et al., 2026), with a focus on human rights and inclusion whenever examining disability or other diverse areas. The organization's measurable health outcomes are its relevance in real world public health.
Wings for Autism: A National Public Safety Initiative
The Arc's national airport initiative program is an excellent example of mission-driven public safety. Wings for Autism is a low pressure, structured search-and-dreams rehearsal of airport travel for families of persons with autism (The Arc, 2025). This program offers training to airport, airline, and TSA personnel on effective ways to support airline passengers who have intellectual and developmental disabilities (The Arc, 2025). This is a reflection of how The Arc works to apply its mission, "One by One, The Public's Safer" across the country.
Promoting Equal Opportunity and Improving Quality of Life
An organisation's value is more than what it drops out with, it is the effect it can have on a person's life. Despite economic barriers, very few people with IDD are employed in integrated competitive jobs; that is just 21 percent of people with IDD in the country overall (DuBois et al., 2025). Social/cultural barriers are also a problem because employers don't yet recognise the true potential in people with IDD in the workplace (Iwanaga et al., 2023). All these walls are illustrative of the fact that organized, sustained advocacy is still extremely necessary to achieve equal opportunity.
There are physical and structural barriers beyond intellectual barriers facing many persons with intellectual disabilities which make their inclusion in the community difficult. An intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) adult's employment status is very prominent with their overall score for their quality of life (Randall et al., 2023). The Arc plays a direct role in addressing these barriers through employment, transportation and community inclusion programs in the many chapters of The Arc (The Arc 2025). This assessment proves that services provided by this organisation have a real and tangible impact on the quality of life.
Community Example: The Erskine Green Training Institute
The attention is focused on overcoming these barriers in targeted programming in the concrete community example. The Erskine Green Training Institute (EGTI) is an initiative to train persons with disability to work in the healthcare and hospitality sector (26 Erskine Green Training Institute, 2026). Longstanding cultural assumptions about a limited ability to do work were challenged by the graduates, and more than 80% found permanent jobs (Erskine Green Training Institute, 2026). It maps out the training's effect in diminishing cultural stigma and improving the real life, lasting quality of living experiences.
Funding Sources, Policy, and Legislative Influence
One of the essential elements to maintaining a non-profit's daily operations is having a consistent revenue stream from a number of different sources. There are annual chapter membership fees and government grants to the national office of the Arc that amount to $700,000 or more (Influence Watch, 2024). According to the Arc New York (2024) statistic, the New York local leaders of the Arc rely on Medicaid and that accounts for about ninety percent of services related to IDD. There are clear policy choices being shown in this funding method and an ongoing reliance on government funding.
There are clearly areas of measurable service reduction because of financial constraints at the national level for persons with intellectual & developmental disabilities. nationally over 650,000 people are waiting on the H/CBS wait list (The Arc New York, 2024). The difficulty of successfully plans to match inflation with under-inadequate cost-of-living increases has ultimately impacted direct-care staffing and service capacity (The Arc New York 2024). The Arc's mission is directly affected by the both the policy and the funding gaps.
Implications for Individuals, Families, and Communities
Such financing and policy choices have tangible long-term impacts on people, families and communities. Families frequently must wait extended waiting lists for needed home and community-based services, and they also have to advocate for services (The Arc New York, 2024). Because of low Medicaid reimbursements, skilled workers move away from communities because of the lack of competitive compensation rates for direct-care workers (The Arc New York, 2024). Effectively meeting the current funding gaps is therefore still crucial to ensure equal services for persons with IDD.
Local Community Health and Safety Impact and Nursing Involvement
The Arc's programs have very real health and safety results for people in the community in which they work. At the airport rehearsal 75 people were involved to benefit families throughout the Philadelphia region (Philadelphia International Airport, 2025). Erskine Green Training Institute's healthcare and hospitality placements positively impacted communities in Muncie and Indianapolis, Indiana (Erskine Green Training Institute, 2026). The local case studies demonstrate the enduring and measurable impact on participants that has been seen in terms of safety, confidence and economic stability.
In addition to individual programs, The Arc's national network tackles entrenched health inequities in many communities. In general, compared with adults without functional limitations in the U.S., adults with IDD have much higher rates of having healthcare needs that go unmet (Mesmar et al., 2025). The Arc local chapters work directly to close these documented gaps in access to healthcare navigation resources by connecting families to resources available to them (Kronk et al., 2024). The services and advocacy offered in this way can, over time, have a significant impact on community health and safety outcomes.
Creative Opportunities for Nursing Involvement
Nurses have the opportunity to be involved in meaningful ways with The Arc, in both traditional and creative ways. More nurse practitioners are being trained in competency-based education across their graduate programs that includes disability-specific competencies, enabling nurses to be trained for community disability partnerships (Osuna et al., 2026). Nurses were encouraged to volunteer as on-site health educators at Wings for Autism events or be on chapter advisory boards. Such groundbreaking partnerships allow nurses to translate their health promotion expertise and skills into disability advocacy.
Conclusion
The Arc is a model of the power of a mission-driven non-profit to change public health and safety. It helps close gaps in employment supports, financial resources and health care access for people with IDD who are still struggling. See the life-changing results of community examples such as Erskine Green Training Institute and Wings for Autism. Nurses can make a significant contribution to promote equity and community health for all when working in collaboration with other groups, such as The Arc.
References
DuBois, L. A., Bradley, V., & Isvan, N. (2025). An observational investigation of unemployment, underemployment, and competitive integrated employment of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in 2021–2022. Disability and Health Journal, 18(3), e101620. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dhjo.2024.101620
Erskine Green Training Institute. (2026). About EGTI. https://www.erskinegreeninstitute.org/about-egti/
Influence Watch. (2024). The Arc of the United States. https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/the-arc-of-the-united-states/
Iwanaga, K., Lee, D., Hamburg, J., Wu, J.-R., Chen, X., Rumrill, P., Wehman, P., Tansey, T. N., & Chan, F. (2023). Effects of supported employment on the competitive integrated employment outcomes of transition age and young adults with intellectual disabilities: A non-experimental causal comparative study. Journal of Vocational Rehabilitation, 58(1), 39–48. https://doi.org/10.3233/JVR-221223
Kronk, R., Lucas, D., & Williams, S. (2024). Nurse practitioner education: Uniting the 2021 essentials with the core competencies on disability health care education. Journal of the American Association of Nurse Practitioners, 36(2), 121–127. https://doi.org/10.1097/JXX.0000000000000953
Mesmar, A., Limungi, G. M., Elmadani, M., Simon, K., Hamad, O., Tóth, L., Horvath, E., & Mate, O. (2025). Bridging healthcare disparities: A systematic review of healthcare access for disabled individuals in rural and urban areas. Frontiers in Health Services, 5, e1695320. https://doi.org/10.3389/frhs.2025.1695320
Osuna, A. R., Kennedy, J., Zhou, C., & Christakis, D. A. (2026). Anxiety, depression, and care barriers in adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Journal of American Microbiology Association Network Open, 9(2), e2560205. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.60205
Philadelphia International Airport. (2025). Wings for Autism lands at PHL. https://www.phl.org/node/2420
Randall, K. N., Bernard, G., & Durah, L. (2023). Association between employment status and quality of life for individuals with intellectual or developmental disability. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 36(2), 270–280. https://doi.org/10.1111/jar.13053
The Arc. (2025). Our mission and core values. https://thearc.org/about-us/mission-values/
The Arc New York. (2024). Advocacy priority: Preserve Medicaid funding. https://thearcny.org/individual-priorities-medicaid-funding/