A Message from Commissioner Willow Baer: Investing in Advocacy, A...

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

As we wrap up 2025, I am so grateful for the many steps forward we took together over the last twelve months. When I officially stepped into my role as your Commissioner earlier this year, I talked about our future and I vowed to listen to you and to amplify the voices of everyone who interacts with our service system. I am so proud to see that amplification at work throughout the state as we continue to focus together on advocacy, access to support and quality outcomes.

WATCH OUR 2025 WRAP-UP VIDEO

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2025: Amplifying Your Voice

While our work together continues into a new year, here are a few of the highlights that made 2025 particularly noteworthy:

Advocacy and Amplification

New York State committed funds to build a Willowbrook Center for Learning: a transformation of “Building 29” at the historic Willowbrook State School site in Staten Island. The Center will serve as a memorial and innovation hub, honoring Willowbrook's legacy of disability rights reform while fostering future progress for people with developmental disabilities.
In May, advocates from all over the country came together to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of the Willowbrook Consent Decree, which not only paved the way for better living conditions, but led to the ultimate closure of the Willowbrook State School and the advent of inclusive community living.
OPWDD launched its new Office of Advocacy Services, staffed by a Director and a team of peer specialists, people with lived experience, who advise our leadership team and act as resources and advocates for people with developmental disabilities and their families as they navigate our service system.
We launched Accessing Life, a new podcast hosted and produced by self-advocates to discuss vital topics to the disability community.
We created a new Family Advocacy page on the OPWDD website specifically for families new to the OPWDD system.
We created new “Know Your Rights” videos and a brochure to assist advocates as we celebrated the 35^th Anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act.
We raised the new Neurodiversity Flag with Joshua Mirsky, a member of the Autism Spectrum Disorders Advisory Board who designed the flag, at the Autism Trail in Letchworth State Park.

Access to Support

New York State committed $25 Million in funding to expand existing health and dental clinics, improving access to preventive and specialty health services to people with developmental disabilities.
OPWDD launched the Commissioner’s Developmental Disabilities Taskforce on Aging, comprised of self and family advocates, health care professionals, and subject matter experts on aging and housing, to better support the needs of a growing number of aging New Yorkers with developmental disabilities.
We continued to prioritize access to meaningful employment as part of NYS’s commitment to Employment First, announcing a partnership with SUNY's
Center for Assistive Technology that will provide transformational independence for people with developmental disabilities in their daily lives, including in the workplace. We also revamped our Employment Pages on the OPWDD website to better explain the paths to employment and how our services can be a part of the journey.
We created an Informational Presentation for people with developmental disabilities and family members to better understand and prepare for their OPWDD Coordinated Assessment System or “CAS” assessments and created the character CASsie to help.
To more efficiently identify need and provide access to certified residential services, OPWDD launched its first phase of the new Capacity Management Application to help us better connect people with services.
OPWDD opened 9 state-operated Comprehensive Adult Transitional Homes for young adults transitioning out of residential schools or other more institutional settings. These homes are specialized and intended to be short-term step downs for New Yorkers with the highest behavioral needs, providing the enhanced support needed to transition to community living.
We have partnered with the Office of Mental Health (OMH) to provide needed crisis supports for people with complex needs such as home-based crisis intervention teams, critical time transition teams, an Enhanced Step-Down Program, as well as a Specialized Residential Treatment Facility at Our Lady of Victory in Western New York and a Children’s Specialized Multi-Disciplinary Inpatient Unit at SUNY Upstate.
Through Project ECHO, OPWDD and OMH are training crisis line counselors to be well prepared to respond to callers with developmental disabilities who have co-occurring mental health conditions.

Quality

New York State invested an additional $850 Million in rate adjustments for our non-profit providers to help them continue to maintain critical supports and recruit and retain talented and qualified frontline staff that are vital to maintaining quality supports.
We completed external evaluations of our Self-Direction model and Care Coordination Organizations (CCOs), to help improve the customer experience of these programs.
We’ve enhanced recruitment efforts through the #MoreThanWork campaign, driving more than 1.6 million visitors to directsupportcareers.com with more than 96,000 interested jobseekers clicking through to participating provider websites to learn more about job opportunities.
We improved the professionalization and skillset of front-line staff by investing in successful certification and microcredential initiatives in partnership with the National Alliance for Direct Support Professionals and the State University of New York.
In collaboration with Georgetown University’s National Center on Cultural Competence, we conducted listening sessions with 1,000 families, 300 non-profit providers, and more than 100 people with developmental disabilities, as part of our systems change work to ensure a system that is culturally competent and available in everyone’s preferred language and communication style.
We updated our agency’s 5-Year Strategic Plan to further reflect what you told us you want for yourselves from our service system.

As we head into 2026, I continue to feel grateful to work alongside all of you as we continue to lean into advocacy and work to improve equitable access to support, as well as enhance quality and the customer experience throughout our system. Thank you for your continued partnership.

With Gratitude,

Willow Baer
Commissioner

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