April 24, 2025
You may have heard that Karis Disability Services is currently undergoing a review of its services by FOCUS Accreditation, one of our accrediting partners. FOCUS Accreditation is reviewing Karis and confirming that the work that we do together meets or exceeds all FOCUS Accreditation standards. This also helps Karis to learn more about some things that we can do to make things even better moving forward.
The current phase of this review, our Onsite Validation, started on April 7th, at selected service locations and offices across Ontario and Saskatchewan, and will wrap up with visits in the South Ontario district this week. These visits in each district included visits to Supported Group Living locations, and a “Meet and Greet with FOCUS” event, or similar planned event, at an office or daytime services location.
While we will not know right away how our validation is going, FOCUS has shared that they have been impressed with the level of engagement at these visits, and just how person-directed they have experienced our services to be during their visits.
Thank you to everyone who has been involved in these visits for showing our very best, and for making this experience a positive and memorable one for the FOCUS validators who have been visiting with us. Also, a special thank you to everyone who has been working as part of the FOCUS Champions team, and for everyone who has helped to prepare for these visits.
Stay tuned over the coming weeks for more information about our FOCUS Accreditation journey, and what we expect (and when we may expect it) moving forward.
If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact quality@karis.org.
Quality, Research and Practice Initiatives Department