At No Limits Eastern Shore, our mission is to improve the lives of survivors of brain injury on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and our philosophy is based on the simple fact that our business is concerned with human beings and therefore we follow a person-centered model. People, choices, respect, dignity: these are more than buzzwords here, they are integral to our operations.
No Limits is a Happy Place as a matter of policy. We don’t tolerate unpleasantness because it interferes with and disrupts the group. Group members work together, facilitated by staff, and they are an integral part of all planning and decision making. The very heart of our philosophy can be summed up in one phrase: “Use it or lose it”. We believe that the best way for long term survivors of brain injury to improve and maintain their abilities in the areas most commonly affected by brain injury (cognition, attention, memory, movement, communication) is to actively use those abilities – use it or lose it.
We also believe wholeheartedly in the classic old school values of rehabilitation: Independence, Integration, Inclusion, and Productivity. These values represent the pot of gold at the end of the recovery rainbow and they inform everything we do at NLES. We help survivors of brain injury to be as independent, as physically integrated, and as socially included as possible in the community while encouraging them to engage in meaningful productive activity. It is our belief that active, happy, healthy, useful people who are meaningfully connected to their community are far less likely to require costly and complicated medical and/or behavioral interventions.
At No Limits Eastern Shore, there are no meaningless activities. We don’t believe in “busy work”, we’d rather be “busy working”. In addition to our productivity activities, we follow a “use it or lose it!” approach to skill recovery and skill maintenance after brain injury. No Limits maintains an ongoing schedule of activities designed to develop and strengthen the skill areas commonly impacted by brain injury. We categorize our activities in the following areas: Cognitive, Health/Wellness, Community Impact/Outreach, Productivity, and Independent Living.
We don’t identify survivors by their injury. If an individual survivor chooses to share their circumstances, it is entirely up to them. We do not post injury histories on our walls or on our website. All participants of No Limits Eastern Shore are brain injury survivors; it is our mission to improve the lives of brain injury survivors on the Eastern Shore of Virginia and a condition of our funding. Beyond that, it is their personal business and entirely up to each individual to choose what they would like to share. We choose to focus on what brain injury survivors can do today, not on what happened to them.
The strengths and weaknesses of individual members counterbalance each other when we work together. The whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts: No Limits, the group of survivors of brain injury, can do many things together that would be a struggle, if not outright impossible for individual members to accomplish.
