Being Welcomed Into a Family’s Village

An Introduction to Shape Our Village

When a family invites a BCBA into their home, they are not just beginning services — they are opening their village.

This invitation is tender and vulnerable. It often arrives layered with hope, exhaustion, fear, love, urgency, and uncertainty. It is an invitation to witness daily life — not just data points — and to participate in a system that has been shaped by years of experience, culture, stress, resilience, and care.

A family’s village is not defined by titles. It is made up of the people who show up in a child’s learning environment — and who are learning, too.

Sometimes that village includes caregivers and a child. Sometimes it includes a BCBA, an RBT, or other providers. Sometimes it extends to grandparents, siblings, teachers, childcare providers, or members of the broader community.

And sometimes, because of access, systems, time, finances, or sheer exhaustion, the village is smaller than we would wish.

Shape Our Village was created from the belief that ABA is not something we do to families. It is something we enter with care.

What Shape Our Village Is

Shape Our Village is a trauma-informed, caregiver-centered curriculum designed to support BCBAs in facilitating meaningful parent engagement and caregiver education.

It is not a script nor a checklist, but a framework that helps professionals slow down, listen deeply, and co-create learning environments that honor the lived experiences of families.

At its core, Shape Our Village is grounded in cultural humility — the understanding that no professional enters a home as the expert on that family’s values, history, identity, or daily realities. Families do not need to be fixed or reshaped to fit a model. Our role is to collaborate, adapt, and learn alongside them.

This work asks us to see the family team not as a hierarchy of roles, but as a learning system — shaped by relationships, history, stress, access, and care.

Each person enters the village with their own repertoires, strengths, stressors, and needs. Each person is responding to what has worked before. Each person is learning all the time, whether or not that learning is named, measured, or intended.

The Perspectives Within the Village

Every village holds multiple perspectives. When we name them honestly, we create space for trust, growth, and real learning to occur.

1. The Caregiver Perspective

Caregivers often enter ABA carrying an overwhelming amount of information. They have read articles, followed social media accounts, attended appointments, and received opinions — sometimes conflicting, sometimes urgent, sometimes fear-based.

Despite all of this information, many caregivers still ask the same quiet question: "I know so much… but I still don’t know what to do.”

Alongside information overload lives fear: fear of the future, fear of making the wrong decision, fear of missing a critical window, fear of not being enough. Some caregivers arrive guarded not because they are resistant, but because past experiences with systems have taught them to be careful.

Beneath these layers, there is often grief. Grief for expectations once held, for futures once imagined, and for the emotional weight of adjusting to a reality they did not choose.

Caregivers are also managing something rarely acknowledged in treatment plans: their own well-being. Capacity for care does not exist in a vacuum. Exhaustion, stress, health concerns, and emotional load directly impact a caregiver’s ability to show up, learn, and sustain change.

Shape Our Village recognizes caregivers not as implementers of someone else’s plan, but as human beings on their own learning journeys deserving of clarity, compassion, support, and care themselves.

2. The Professional Perspective

Professionals enter the village with good intentions and often with quiet strain.

Burnout in this field is real. When systems prioritize productivity over presence, and outcomes over relationships, professionals can begin to feel disconnected from the very reasons they entered this work.

Burnout can show up as emotional distancing or apathy. It can also emerge as anxiety, chronic health issues, compassion fatigue, or a loss of meaning.

Shape Our Village creates space for professionals to reconnect with reflective practice to notice their own learning histories, nervous systems, and limits and to engage in work that feels ethical, relational, and sustainable.

This framework invites professionals to be guests in a family’s village — not authorities above it — honoring moments when expertise guides the work and moments when learning together matters more than having the answer.

3. The Learner Perspective — The Center of the Village

At the center of the village is the learner.

The learner does not choose to enter services. They experience the impact of every interaction, expectation, and environment created around them. Their behavior is communication. Their regulation is foundational. Their sense of safety shapes their ability to learn.

In Shape Our Village, the learner is not the project. They are the possibility.

We hold a deep belief that every person can learn and that learning unfolds across a wide, individual range. Our shared journey is not about forcing progress, but about creating the conditions that allow each learner to reach the uppermost end of their potential for growth.

We shoot for the moon, knowing that even landing among the stars represents meaningful, life-changing learning.

Learning Together

Shape Our Village is built on the understanding that learning is not one-directional.

Caregivers are learning. Professionals are learning. Learners are learning.

And the family team, however large or small, is shaped by what works, what doesn’t, and what is noticed along the way.

When we center humanity, cultural humility, and collaboration, progress becomes more than a data point. It becomes something felt, sustained, and shared.

An Invitation

Shape Our Village exists for families and professionals who believe that support should feel humane, relational, and grounded in respect.

If you are part of a child’s learning environment — as a caregiver, a professional, a teacher, a family member, or a learner — you are already part of the village.

You belong here.

What did you notice as you read this?

This piece was originally published on Substack.