My name is Alex Carli, and from 2014-2023 I was part of the support field for people with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, primarily as a direct support professional for the Illinois Crisis Prevention Network (ICPN), also known as the Support Services Team (SST). SST works to find adaptive solutions to behavioral challenges posed by people born with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities in the interest of preventing their institutionalization. Beyond that I have been a Paraprofessional in a therapeutic day school, a Personal Support Worker (PSW), a day program manager, and an Independent Service Coordinator (ISC) who helped maintain Illinois’s PUNS waiting list. I have also been a certified trainer of Quality Behavioral Solutions (QBS)’s SafetyCare as well as the Crisis Prevention Institute’s (CPI) Non-violent Crisis Intervention (NCI) programs.

I am starting this site and blog after an episode of Major Depression rendered me unable to complete my duties as an ISC. I am applying for short term disability, but hope to fashion a new way to use my skills and experience to help support this community I love while supporting myself and my family. In building rapport with my clients, I noticed that there is a unique quality to a smile that comes from a sense of connection. I intend to show those smiles to the world through neuroaffirming photography practices. All photos on this site, unless credited otherwise, are my own.

While I currently work to start a simple photography business, I hope to use this site to build a community where self-advocates, families, and professionals can come together to learn more about one another’s perspectives to better improve quality of support for those in desperate need of understanding and compassion.

For those not involved with this population, I hope to show the joy one can witness in making the effort to meet these people and see them not for the stereotypes one may fear, but for the wonderfully complex human beings they are.

In my experience, families would tell me the same thing when sitting with their loved one experiencing a happy moment– irrespective of disability, race, religion, culture, or any of the other ways in which we divide ourselves:

“This is how they are 95% of the time.”