WILTON — Life Enrichment Advancing People, or LEAP, celebrated its 35th year Thursday with a gathering at Calzolaio’s Pasta Co.

“A lot has changed in 35 years, but one thing remains the same,” Executive Director Darryl Wood said. “Individuals with significant functional disabilities are born in our communities, and some of them need help outside their families to survive and thrive.”

Based in Farmington, the nonprofit organization provides support in greater Franklin County, Turner and Rumford at 31 locations. Employing nearly 200 people, with 87 percent providing direct service to individuals, LEAP has services that range from a few hours a week in someone’s home to life in a LEAP-owned home, he said.

“It is not just money, not just three meals a day and a room to call your own that each LEAP client enjoys,” Mills said. “It is the love and care of a decent community.”

Acknowledging the growing epidemic of autism and ongoing challenge of those born with developmental disabilities, Mills recounted how the state moved away from the institutional warehousing of people who could not care for themselves to become a national leader in providing services for them in the community.

“On July 3, 1975, a group of concerned individuals filed a lawsuit in the federal court in Portland alleging a violation of federal civil rights of the individuals then housed in the Pineland Center (in New Gloucester),” she said.

It was not a home or a hospital, she said.  

“It was an ‘institution’ in the worst sense of the word, a warehouse for human souls,” Mills said. “It was where families deposited individuals who were labeled ‘mentally retarded,’ whether they were in fact disabled or not, because the families could not take care of them. It was where people became invisible, living in the shadows. . . . They were the forgotten, the unknown, the unloved members of our society.”

Legal action resulted in two consent decrees, one in 1978 and the other in 1994. The latter decree reflects the current standards of support for the developmentally disabled, she said. 

The last residents were moved out of Pineland and into the community in 1996 and the institution closed, she said.

“Maine became a national leader in providing services to the developmentally disabled in the community,” she said. “As of 2007, Maine was one of only 10 jurisdictions with no state-operated institutional facilities for the developmentally disabled.”

The Maine Legislature also acted on a series of reforms and the state obtained a federal waiver to pay for residential programs with Medicaid funds, she said.

“Maine was and is ahead of the curve, not simply because of the lawsuit that closed Pineland but because of a caring and energetic group of advocates, because of conscientious lawmakers and policymakers and because of communities like ours which take seriously the responsibility to care for our neediest citizens.”

LEAP was incorporated in 1980 as the Western Maine Association for the Retarded, necessitated by Pineland closing. As the wording used has evolved, so has LEAP, according to its newsletter.

abryant@sunmediagroup.net