Person Centred Planning

Person-centred planning is a process-oriented approach to empowering people with disability labels. It focuses on the people and their needs by putting them in charge of defining the direction for their lives, not on the systems that may or may not be available to serve them. This ultimately leads to greater inclusion as valued members of both community and society. Person-centred planning involves the development of a toolbox of methods and resources that enable people with disability labels to choose their own pathways to success; the planners simply help them to figure out where they want to go and how best to get there.

Many people are asking What is Person Centred Planning?

Basically, it is a constellation of tools developed to help a person or a family who want to make a purposeful and meaningful change in their life. Person Centred Planning tools include; Individual Service Design, Lifestyle Planning, Personal Futures Planning, Essential Lifestyle Planning, and; MAPS and PATH.

The facilitator is a servant to both the person and the process. Imagine the facilitator holding a set of empty containers and drawing the contents to fill each container out of the person and his/her friends, family and colleagues. Each of the different tools offers a somewhat different set of containers.

Person-centred planning has become a familiar term in the service delivery world. In many ways the term has taken on a life of its own: People attend training in order to become person-centred, while organizations boast of being person-centred in the delivery of services to people who have disability labels. So common has the language of person-centred practices become that there is a danger of the same soup in a different cup syndrome. What this means is that we run the risk of putting the newest trendy label on what we have always been serving! In the paper entitled When People Matter More Than Systems, (March 2000 Keynote Presentation for the Conference The Promise of Opportunity), Michael Kendrick discusses that person-centred work begins within each and every one of us and radiates out toward others. Our deep-seated belief systems guide the way in which we interact with other human beings. In other words, the planning processes we engage in with people are a mirror image of what we believe about a person or about a group of people. These core beliefs help to define our degree of what Kendrick has coined as person centeredness. Simply thinking that we are being person-centred does not make us person-centred; it is what we actually do that ultimately reveals our true priorities. It requires a personal commitment to engaging conscious awareness and self-reflection about the relationship between how one feels, thinks, and acts. It is beliefs forming thoughts giving rise to words leading to action that, in turn, create experiences. Person-centred planning is a way in which one can listen to people and learn about important aspects of a ...