Why North Star Oregon

How we compare — and why it matters

Choosing a disability support agency for someone you love is one of the most consequential decisions a family makes. The differences between providers are real, but they aren’t always visible from a website. This page lays them out plainly.

Figures about other agencies come from each agency’s own public materials, published news articles, salary aggregators (Indeed, Glassdoor), or Oregon government records. We don’t cite hearsay, we don’t guess at numbers, and we update this page when public information changes.

What stands out

Day Support Activities is the sharpest difference

North Star Oregon runs structured Day Support Activities (DSA) from six Willamette Valley community hubs — Albany, Corvallis, Eugene, Springfield, Salem, and Tangent — Monday through Friday, with a seventh hub now serving Grants Pass and the broader Rogue Valley. Of the agencies above, no one else operates DSA at this scale. Rever Grand and Enable don’t run DSA. Community Access Services offers DSA, though its public materials do not list a comparable multi-hub schedule. Encompass and Premier offer outings-style activities, but not multi-hub structured programs.

Wages: a competitive market with a clear top

Enable Oregon leads the market on flat hourly cash at $30/hr, but it caps DSP earnings there because it does not allow overtime. North Star Oregon sits at $25–$26/hr, with Rever Grand, Premier, and Empowered close behind. Current Community Access Services postings range from $21.50–$24.50/hr depending on location and role. The base rate isn’t the full picture, though. North Star’s overtime is available to all employees, which changes the math substantially — in particular for parent caregivers hired as W-2 employees to support their own adult child. A parent working 17 hours a day, five days a week, at $25–$26/hr base, earns 40 regular hours plus 45 overtime hours at 1.5×. That comes out to roughly $140,000–$145,000 a year— higher than any flat-hourly comparison in this market. North Star’s 401(k) match goes up to 3.5% of compensation, which holds up against the rest of the field where most agencies don’t publicly disclose plan structure beyond “match offered.”

How it feels to be a client

We’re a small, founder-led team. Our leaders are cross-trained and stay close to every client. That means when you call, you reach someone who knows you and your loved one — not a queue, not a department transfer, not a different coordinator each time. Larger agencies (Rever Grand publishes roughly 100 administrative staff) tend to specialize roles, which can create handoffs between hiring, scheduling, billing, and care coordination. Both models have legitimate trade-offs — we think families with complex needs are better served by continuity.

Regulatory standing

Rever Grand is currently on a 4-year probation under the Oregon Department of Justice for Medicaid fraud (Making a False Claim for Health Care Payment), settled October 28, 2025. The agency was sold to new ownership in January 2025, before the settlement, and independent third-party monitoring is required as a condition of probation. North Star Oregon and the other providers compared above have no public regulatory actions on file. We name this because it’s a fact families deserve to know when comparing agencies, and the full Oregon DOJ press release is publicly available.