NMC To Unveil New Pilot Program For College-Aged Individuals With Intellectual Disabilities

Northwestern Michigan College (NMC) will pilot a new program in fall 2026, aimed at offering enriching educational experiences for individuals diagnosed with intellectual disabilities. The pilot program is a partnership with Ready for Life, a Grand Rapids-based nonprofit that has previously worked with Hope College, Ferris University, and Calvin College. According to NMC Communications Director Cari Noga, NMC will be the first community college to host a Ready for Life Academy program on its campus.

Jason Slade, NMC’s vice president for strategic initiatives, will tee off the Ready for Life partnership at this week’s NMC Board of Trustees meeting, scheduled for Monday evening at the Timothy J. Nelson Innovation Center. Slade is set to present a progress report to trustees on strategy 3 of NMC Next, the college’s currently-in-progress strategic plan; strategy 3 calls for NMC to “cultivate an inclusive environment that fosters a sense of belonging and delivers equitable opportunities so all students and employees can thrive and succeed” – a DEIB focus that includes individuals with disabilities under its umbrella.

“The college is working with Ready for Life, a nonprofit focused on inclusive communities and cultivating opportunities for people with disabilities to grow, learn, and achieve,” Slade wrote in a memo to trustees included in Monday’s meeting packet. “The program will launch in Fall ‘26 and bring Ready for Life to our campus providing post-secondary educational experiences for college-aged individuals diagnosed with intellectual disabilities. This project was spearheaded by Cari Noga, with seed money provided through an NMC Foundation innovation grant, and in collaboration with community partners, to address a need in the region.”

“It’s kind of my baby,” Noga tells The Ticker of the Ready for Life partnership, which she has been championing for years. In fact, it was all the way back in the summer of 2021 that Noga secured the innovation grant from the NMC Foundation to pursue the “discovery phase” for potentially bringing an Instructional Independent Living Community (IILC) to NMC.

According to a presentation provided to The Ticker by Noga, an IILC would take the form of “a residence hall/wing/floor on or near campus,” and would provide a setting for “timebound transition skills practice” for people with developmental disabilities like autism, Down’s syndrome, or cognitive disabilities. By allowing those students to practice skills around independent living, social relationships, financial literacy, employment skills, and schooling, an IILC model would provide a runway toward “successful, long-term housing and employment in the community.”

Per Noga, most adults with intellectual disabilities live at home and are unemployed. In May 2022, as part of the discovery phase, NMC hosted a focus group with 42 local parents and guardians, 87.5 percent of whom said their adult children still lived at home because of their disabilities. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, meanwhile, shows that the employment rate for people with a disability is just 17.9 percent. In Michigan, school-based services for people with disabilities last until the age of 26, but Noga says supports mostly vanish after that, leaving individuals “largely isolated in their homes.”

Having an IILC program in Traverse City would be one way to provide a pathway toward independent living for the local population of people with intellectual disabilities. A partnership with an established organization like Ready for Life is one way of getting there.

“We did a pilot program with [Ready for Life] two summers ago, where 10 students came to NMC, lived on campus, at East Hall, and took a video production class,” Noga says. In the video, which can be viewed here, Ready for Life students shared stories about how the program helped them learn, grow, and gain independence.

“It went really well,” Noga says of the brief summer pilot. “And so, we are going to try it with eight students again in fall of ’26. They'll be jointly enrolled in Ready for Life programming, which teaches key transition skill stuff, and at NMC, where they'll take, for credit, two classes.”

Noga says the opportunity for a more full-fledged semester-length partnership with Ready for Life emerged recently, when one of the program’s partners decided to change gears.

“They currently have Ready for Life Academy sites at Hope and Ferris, and they did have one at Calvin,” Noga explains. “But then Calvin decided to take this programming on as their own, and that created a little extra capacity for Ready for Life. They were looking for a new site, and they called us.”

Last May, Ready for Life Director Toni Falk reached out to Noga to propose a new partnership with NMC. The next month, Slade and NMC President Nick Nissley approved a due diligence phase, which included meetings between NMC leaders and Ready for Life, a campus visit by Falk in September, and, ultimately, a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between the two organizations. NMC and Ready for Life officially signed that MOU last month, hence the tee-off for the partnership at this month’s board meeting.

While the fall 2026 pilot program will involve just a small number of students, Noga sees big potential for the budding NMC-Ready for Life alliance to make NMC more welcoming and inclusive, boost enrollment, and even change lives.

“Up to now, most of these students [affiliated with Ready for Life] have been from the Grand Rapids area; there's nothing north of Grand Rapids like this program,” Noga says. “And so, the idea was to say, ‘Okay, these students’ lives have been changed by this program. Now, what would their peers in northern Michigan’s lives be like if they had access to a similar program?’”