What is 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.
Introduction to Person-Centred Planning
"It is so easy to change our language without changing our structure or our culture" ~John O'Brien
"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 tr