I was very interested in reading about your model as we have also been trying to set up a home for our son and his friend, along with someone to live in to support them, in our community in North Vancouver. Your schedule of set hours and time off sounds very workable to me. Our process started out with a family directed process to find the individual to support our young adults and we are now using a community living agency. We do not have a LIGHTS model organization in Vancouver but I think this type of organization would be very helpful in BC as we have many families trying to set up supported living situations for their adult children. The difficulty we have is the funding model in our province is a flat rate home share contractor rate, which may work when people are bringing someone with a disability to live in their home, but does not work so well when it is the supported individual’s own home. The reason the rate associated with the home share model is problematic, is it is a flat rate with 24/7 responsibility. Our son has community inclusion support hours during the day, 6 hours, and his friend has a job one day and some community programs the other days. Your model sounds similar to ours in the weekly concept (ours was 7-10 and 4 to bedtime and then overnight, with daytime responsibility only if needed) but with our homeshare model they would then be responsible all weekend too. Finding someone has proved impossible (we had one short failed arrangement) and now I am trying to put together a hybrid of one person on the flat home share rate and some paid staff on the weekend–with both our families covering Sundays–not really the ideal model for adult autonomy. As far as our hiring process goes, each family has interviewed the candidate (now with the agency involved they do the initial interview) and then a meeting is set up with each family and our young adult present. We also had the person (in our short lived arrangement) over for dinner and I took her out to a concert with our two young adults so they could all get to know each other. I would like to talk to you about the financial piece of your staffing model if you would be willing to discuss this with me privately. Kind regards, Pat