User:Wellington Hall resident

I moved to Middlesex County Hospital in August 1971 after graduating high school from the Massachusetts Hospital School in Canton. I came up with two other young adults with disabilities (David Crane and John Eldon) to live there because we had no other place to live. The three of us lived on 3 West and eventually moved to a vacant part of the hospital called Wellington Hall in 1972. Wellington was an experiment that eventually lead to the creation of the Boston Center for Independent living (BCIL). A total of 10 "residents" lived there at any one time until the early 1980s. It was a cutting-edge program in its time and was done with the collaboration of the hospital administrator, John Noble, Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission employee Robert McHugh and Massachusetts Hospital School social worker Karen Launden. Residents Charles Carr and Nancy Magee cochaired a Residents Committee that worked with people inside and out of the institution to prepare for the eventual creation of BCIL. It remains the precursor to independent living in Massachusetts.Submitted by Charles Carr