New Beginnings to open on Little Flower campus in Wading River

New Beginnings, a comprehensive center for individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI) and other disabilities, will soon have a new home at Little Flower Children and Family Services of New York in Wading River.

In the first phase, Amber House, a residential home for those dealing with disability, will open there Dec. 15. This facility will be in addition to Brendan House, a similar home on Sound Avenue in Riverhead.

Allyson Scerri, president, CEO and founder of New Beginnings, knows the difficulty of finding adequate care for those with TBI. Ms. Scerri moved her father into her home after he suffered TBI in a 2007 motorcycle accident. “My father was in a coma for seven weeks, 16 weeks in the hospital, and when he came out of the hospital, he moved in with me. I really did not know what I was in for, because when you experienced traumatic brain injury, you know they could be angry, combative. He really wasn’t my father, such a different person,” Ms. Scerri recalled.

Once he came to live with her, Ms. Scerri began looking for therapies that could help her father regain some of his life. “Slowly I could see him getting better, but we had to drive miles west and then go east for all these different therapies,” she said. 

In the midst of this, her husband suggested she establish her own center for TBI that could offer all these services in one place. Ms. Scerri, a hairdresser with no professional experience in the medical field, took on the challenge. She opened New Beginnings Community Center in Medford, then Brendan House, which is now fully occupied, with a waiting list.

Amber House is named for a woman from the Bronx who died before New Beginnings was able to take her into its care. “I said, ‘No, I’m going to find a way to get set up that I can take people like Amber from now on.’ It really affected me,” said Ms. Scerri. 

Shortly after that experience, she and her husband went to look at the Little Flower property. The site was ideal, and Little Flower agreed to partner with New Beginnings. 

The goal for New Beginnings is simple: Ms. Scerri wants to be able to make a difference for every person who reaches out. “[The goal] is to help with each phone call in some way,” she said. “Whether they’re high functioning, middle, critical, coma, I want to take every level of injury and be able to help all the way around.” 

For people whose lives are forever altered by TBI or some other debilitating experience, this type of facility can provide a network of support they might not receive otherwise. “It’s a very lonely injury, and they see their friends getting married and going off having their own lives, and still they’re here with that injury, sitting in a wheelchair most of the time,” said Ms. Scerri. 

“And it shouldn’t be a sad life,” she added. “There has to be some kind of productive and quality of life within their injury. That’s very important, that they feel good about themselves.”