Director
Jo Massarelli is Director of the SRV Implementation Project, a human service training and consultation concern based in Worcester, Massachusetts (USA). She divides her time at the project between teaching Social Role Valorization-based workshops, and working with families, human service staff and people with impairments to bring about positive change, one person at a time.
She has taught at workshops and lectured at conferences across the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand to a variety of human service workers serving a wide range of people devalued due to intellectual impairment, mental disorder, physical impairment, age (elders), and poverty. Ms. Massarelli has also evaluated dozens of human service programs for children, adults and elders, including residential, day and work programs, schools, hospice, prisons, and homeless shelters.
Ms. Massarelli has been a teacher closely affiliated with Dr. Wolf Wolfensberger of the Training Institute in Syracuse, New York (USA) since 1983. She is a member and Senior Trainer of the International SRV Training, Development and Safeguarding Council, which meets twice a year to further develop SRV and keep it relevant to changing human service contexts. With Dr. Wolfensberger and a group of associates, she is heavily involved in teaching workshops on two crucial topics: how to provide service that is morally coherent in a disfunctional human service world, and how to craft a coherent protective stance in the face of serious societal threats to the lives of socially devalued people.
Ms. Massarelli has a particular interest in advocacy in medical settings. She teaches a variety of workshops on protecting vulnerable people in the hospital, and on medical decision making. She has co-written a manual based on these workshops. She is also a member of the Medical Safeguards Project, which is a group of nurses and doctors in Massachusetts who are committed to safeguarding the health and lives of mentally impaired people with significant medical needs. Ms. Massarelli serves as a consultant for Family Lives, a program for children with multiple impairments who require twenty-four hour nursing care. Family Lives is committed to providing the medical support necessary for the children to live at home, and Ms. Massarelli works to assist family and nurses alike to envision and realize more than the “patient” role for those served.
Ms. Massarelli serves as an advocate associate to the North Quabbin Citizen Advocacy project. She is involved in training Citizen Advocacy boards and advocates in how social devaluation affects human service recipients.
Jo Massarelli and her husband Marc Tumeinski are members of a voluntary community responding to the needs of homeless people in Worcester, Massachusetts, where they live. They offer hospitality to poor and homeless people in their home.