The Arc Maryland Personal Space Program Curriculum Guide | Page 9

Background
The Personal SPACE Program is a unique gender violence prevention training program for
women with developmental disabilities. It was developed by The Arc of Maryland in
partnership with The Arc of Southern Maryland and The Arc of the United States and funded
by the Administration on Developmental Disabilities through a Projects of National
Significance Grant. The mission of the Personal SPACE Program is to empower women
with disabilities to take greater control of their lives by increasing their ability to protect
themselves, or in people-friendly language, “To learn how to be strong women and how to
protect ourselves.”
The Personal SPACE Program curriculum was developed by The Arc of Maryland’s Gender
Violence Prevention Research and Development Team, made up of women with
developmental disabilities, family members, and professionals in the fields of sex education,
self-advocacy, person-centered planning, violence prevention, counseling, self-esteem and
assertiveness training, personnel training, and program evaluation. In designing the
program, the Research and Development Team believed that:
1. The project must be based on the principles of self-determination and the belief
that individuals have the right to control their own lives.
2. The curriculum must be presented in a way that promotes healthy sexuality and
respects people’s personal choices.
3. The curriculum must be easily understood or accessible.
4. The project must have a continuing learning component.
5. Women with developmental disabilities must be an integral part of the team that
designs the curriculum, trains program participants, and evaluates the program.
While a number of promising, widely scattered curricular responses to violence against
women with developmental disabilities have been developed, in researching such curricula
the Research and Development Team did not find one that had embraced the self-advocacy
movement in all aspects of the curriculum – development, training, and evaluation. In
Maryland, self-advocacy projects and the Self-Determination Initiative support the belief
that all people with developmental disabilities should live in their communities, where they
also need to be safe. In 1997, The Arc of Southern Maryland formed a partnership with the
Calvert County Abused Persons Program to train the Program’s staff how to better work
with individuals with developmental disabilities and those involved in the training wanted to
build on that success. The Arc of Maryland had experienced phenomenal success with its
Know Your Rights project, a training workshop developed and taught by people with
developmental disabilities that educated others about their rights, and the Ask Me! Project, a
quality assurance project in which people with developmental disabilities interview others
with disabilities about their satisfaction with the services they receive through the state’s
Developmental Disabilities Administration. Building upon the success of all these pr