Web Author: Who is Sharone Lee? Threshold's Board of Directors Answers:
Sharone Lee is the Executive Director of Threshold. She was one of the organization's initial founders, and currently holds the office of CEO of our non-profit charitable corporation. Sharone has pursued ongoing training and mentoring in Autism intervention research, theory and practice, therapeutic service organization development, conflict resolution and community reconciliation, and optimum human development outcomes from a variety of scholarly and practitioner sources over her adult life. All her studies, work, and life experiences in business start-ups, visual communication design, architectual team planning, and coaching in youth sports and employee relations helped her first develop the innovative paradigms needed to design and launch each of THRESHOLD's Autism community project sites. Despite personal and professional adversities she has had to face in her life and work journeys, Sharone has shown the kind of mature commitment that has ensured THRESHOLD's survival and success in Oregon's difficult political and economic environments. She is deeply committed to a life of human service and Autism community work upon our NPO/NGO vessel, where she is free to think and act locally and globally in the servant leadership to our Autism community.
Sharone is the author/designer of this web site and our best-Autism-practices trainer. She has worked as a community member, ally, trainer, and consultant to Autism family and service providerships since 1991. Sharone has provided intensive long term training and mentoring to thousands of famililes and professionals in best parenting and teaching practices across the Pacific Northwest over the last eighteen years. She specializes in best Autism practice training and small group peer-mentoring work within family-centered work groups. Threshold's trainings have come to focus on supporting parents as the most stable life span program provider and case managing ally for our children with Autism. Her slogan in her life and work is often heard in her trainings: "Keep going, stay together, follow your chosen best practice guides, and draw out your map as we walk it together...Everything is going to be OK."
In her young life, before she came to the world of Autism, Sharone was a competitive athelete, successful designer, social service project volunteer, and award-winning public speaker. These experiences provided her the exemplary experiences and positive energies she brings to all her Autism service work. For example, in unsolicited recognition of her service to the community Sharone was awarded the 2001-2004 Editorship of The Net Journal of the Autism Society of Oregon Chapter of the Autism Society of America; 2002 Advocate of the Year from the Oregon ARC of Marion County; 1995 Marion County Health Advisory Board Award for Services to the Handicapped; 1993 and 1995 Children's Guild Award for Services to Children with Special Needs; and was recognized by the Statesman Journal as the honorary Volunteer of the Year for their Holiday Issue, December of 1993. However, she feels that her true rewards come from helping children and their parents and teachers get free from the trap of unending crisis and negative problems struggles, as they become able move into a life of positive problem solving and proactive realization of their fullest potentials. This is her passion.
Sharone has worked directly with children and adults with Autism and their family and service providers since 1992, as main trainer and director of Threshold's program sites. In that capacity she served as one of federal contractor representatives for the Marion County Children's Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities Services team on Early Prevention, Screening, Detection, and Treament (EPSDT) from 1993-1995. She is often asked to provide expert advice to attorneys, the courts, and public agencies on issues of abuse prevention between people with and without Autism, critical incident intervention, biosocial diversity relations and reconcilation, and best practice follow up to help people and groups in crisis and conflict to quickly get back to productive, proactive, principled, and positive ways of being and working together in order to avoid real risks of disatrous outcomes and profound loss.
Sharone has received over 500 hours of professional practicum training in early childhood development, including developmental parenting for typical families, cognitive-developmental interventions for children with Autism at the Language Communication Center in Boston; early childhood, schoolage, and adult adolescent training with Division TEACCH at the University of North Carolina, including four years of direct follow-up consulting from the main TEACCH research team; and direct observation of the transdisciplinary therapeutic approach of Giant Steps in British Columbia, a based on a model program for children with Autism in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. Furthermore, she has pursued collegial organizational consultation from other Autism programs across the US such as Judavine in St. Louis, Missouri, as well as university sites and model program providers from England, South Wales in Australia, and Japan. Her ongoing global and locale field inquiry into effective and ethical university-based Autism intervention research has helped Sharone understand and be able to map out the various program model options that are available to our families and children.
Sharone has pursued four college degrees over her adult life to better serve Threshold. She came to the world of Autism with a B.F.A. in visual communication design. With ongoing practimum training in Autism interventions she soon became a specialist in assessment and development of augmentative visual communication systems and teaching materials for individuals with specific sensory, communication, social development needs for adaptive structure. To build on that fieldwork expertise, she achieved a post-bach B.S. in Developmental Research Psychology and her M.A. in Human Development and Diversity with a specialization in Leadership in Education and Human Services for Parent and Community Work. She also achieved a second M.A. in Organizational Systems with a concentration in Information Brokering and Knowledge Management in the area of disabilities, disasters, and profound loss. During her graduate studies she developed a college text for and taught a three-year graduate course series for administrators, college teachers, parent educators, and human service professionals of Pacific Oaks College. That action research work focused on authentic inclusion, effective critical thinking, ethical community-based practice, and reflexive teaching in the areas of literacy, professional fieldwork with families, multiple methods research, and advanced human development and diversity education. The focus of all her studies and work is the kinds of proactive, positive, and mutual adaptative relations, that leads to progressive biosocial change for all peoples, including our Autism community. Finally, Sharone has completed her Ph.D. studies and research in Human and Organizational Systems, with a focus on research methods and best practices in relation to Autism and the real problems and unrealized potentials of people with and without Autism as we struggle to survive, live, work, and cope with its mutual impacts together. Sharone's goal in her graduate studies has been and will continue to be to pursue and promote best practice Autism research projects with a focus on sustainable mission activities for Threshold. This will include launching a new and comprehensive online information brokerage; offering online trainings in the development of model Autism programs and adaptive teaching materials across home, school, workplace, and community settings; professional consulting on transition from school to adult work and life span program success; and of course, family-centered training and peer mentoring group work in relation to our families in our local community.
Based the continual stream of unsolicited positive written feedback from the parents and professionals over the last two decades that we have recieved about Sharone's work for Threshold, we are very confident that Sharone is a good guide for family and service providers who are looking for the best Autism practices that are best-matched to you and your situation.