FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The nonprofit SLS Community recently broke ground on a project for neurodivergent adults to live, work, and receive services to improve their quality of life.
The "Supporting Lifelong Success" Community is moving forward with plans for a location that would sit on 230 acres near Kessler Mountain Park and South Cato Springs in Fayetteville which will be developed specifically for their needs. The area will soon be a residential property that will have a town square, specialty entertainment, hospitality, residential, and retail areas.
The idea behind the project came from a personal experience with the McCombs family.
"The original concept for this was born out of my little sister and her experience with autism. She is beautiful, witty, and hilarious, but she struggles with very severe behavior, and this is something that clicked right around when I was in high school ... that can become a family crisis, you know, a lot of self-injurious behavior, aggression, it reached a clinical point where we needed interventions. She spent a lot of time out of state," said Executive Director Ashton McCombs IV.
Through that lived experience, the Mccombs family decided to fill the gap in the community.
"It's really hard to find services for that behavioral side of the spectrum. and it really impacts everything, every aspect of the family, you know, whether you can travel, go out to eat, pretty much you name it. So the SLS community is gonna serve the whole range across the spectrum of needs. We also want to maintain capacity for those that require some of those high-acuity behavioral interventions," McCombs explained.
In June, there was a groundbreaking ceremony for joint projects such as the South Cato Springs development and the SLS community housing project. Mccombs says this project has been in the making for years… with strategic planning and community involvement.
There was a federal community project funding award that was secured by Congressman Womack, who represents their district, and then a match of $3.48 million from the city of Fayetteville.
"The strategic paradigm of this project is one of collective impact. So, we want to orchestrate a collaborative effort, you know, in this development, between public sectors, private sectors, nonprofits, and the business community to help tackle some of these social problems, because we can't do it alone, and so we think of this development as a kind of canvas where we'll try to do that," McCombs recalled.
UAMS will also serve as a community partner in the project.
"A cornerstone of the property will be UAMS planning a multi-specialty medical facility that has special adaptations and accommodations for neurodiverse adults, adding a research training component from a sensory standpoint," said McCombs.
"Now, the beauty of this partnership was that the city benefited from both of those infrastructure pieces as well, because Mount Kessler Regional Park will now be connected to a sanitary sewer, and it will have a second point of access, which makes it safer," City of Fayetteville Economic Vitality director Devin Howland said.
With the rapid growth across the region, this is a need for the community, and the organization has received a lot of inquiries from families.
"I think it's a need in Northwest Arkansas because the demand is just going to keep growing. You know NWA is clearly growing at a very rapid pace, so there's a rising tide. And we, along with all the existing amazing providers that are out there, want to make sure that neurodivergent adults don't get left behind with that. I think there are a million neurodivergent adults, or individuals nationwide that will reach adulthood in the next decade, and a lot of those are being cared for by caretakers that are over the age of 60, and that can be up to a 40-hour week job, you know, a full-time gig. So, we decided to focus on adults," McCombs said.
Howland thinks of this project as "an attraction of talent. It's also an attraction of families that are seeking these resources because it is huge. It's a nonprofit that has received lots of inquiries over the years because you think about how much parents care and you have these caring parents that see a solution here. And we hope that that energy can help scale this project to get it to the point. When we think about Fayetteville, it is always on that progressive cusp of wanting to help those that need the help the most. And this is just fabulous, I can't envision it anywhere else. The key thing is it's the right thing to do,"
Developers say this project will take 10 to 15 years to complete due to how much land they have to cover, but one of the next big milestones will come later this year when the city breaks ground on the sewer system.
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