L'Arche provides top-quality professional services to people with intellectual disabilities. Government officials, health-care professionals, family members, and others agree that people who live in L'Arche homes receive excellent care. L'Arche's aim is to enable people with intellectual disabilities to have friends, to make decisions, to worship as part of a religious congregation, to participate in civic life, and to have hobbies -- the things that most people want, but things that are often unavailable to people with intellectual disabilities.

There are two keys to L'Arche's success: First, L'Arche provides good professional training and support. L'Arche assistants, the people who provide the services, learn how to meet the special needs of each person. Assistants' help ranges from providing personal physical care, to reading, to holding hands for steadiness while walking, to making important life decisions, and beyond.

Second, and more importantly, L'Arche emphasizes the human in human services. The faith and love that lie at the heart of their own humanity motivate L'Arche assistants to learn about and develop their gifts of faith and love, and their guides in the process are often the people with intellectual disabilities whom they serve. It is the assistants' passionate caring about people that motivates their top-quality caring for people.

The heart of the L'Arche therapeutic milieu lies in relationships of mutual love and trust between the people with and without intellectual disabilities who comprise the L'Arche community. As L'Arche's founder Jean Vanier says, relationships of trust and love are the therapy of L'Arche. Relationships of trust and love are the driving force behind L'Arche's top-quality professional services.