Free Four Week Training

by Person-Centered Planning

More About Person-Centered Planning

What is Person-Centered Planning?

  • Process to help people with disabilities plan for their future
  • Focused on the person with disabilities
  • Strengths-based practice based on the person’s interests, preferences, skills, and abilities
  • Customized to the individual with disabilities and their vision and dreams
  • Good framework for planning and making decisions
  • Awareness of and sensitivity to the person’s capabilities, lifestyle, and cultural background
  • Involves people who care who will help support the person on their path to success – his or her own personal network

Why use Person-Centered Planning?

  • Families, educators, and other professionals will achieve more positive outcomes for the person with the disability while working together towards a common goal
  • Brainstorming process that focuses on collaboration, creativity, possibilities/choices, and finding solutions which leads to increased teamwork and accountability
  • More accurate reflection of the person’s goals and what is needed to help them reach those goals – skills, abilities, instruction, experiences, services, supports
  • Person with disabilities will have control over their life; their voice is heard
  • Long-term community supports are put in place which increases community participation and enhances social supports

How can Person-Centered Planning be utilized in School Transition Plans?

  • Allows the student to participate more actively in their transition planning – being more active leads to more positive vocational rehabilitation outcomes
  • Enhances the quality of assessment and planning activities
  • Helps build positive working relationships between students, families, and professionals
  • Better collaboration and coordination of supports and services
  • Creates roadmaps – choices, options, opportunities, experiences, steps to get to where the student wants to be
  • Focuses on a student’s self-determination and self-advocacy
  • Connects families to adult service agencies before the student leaves high school
  • Helps identify and build natural supports in the community
  • Helps students make a smooth transition from school to adult life – focus on the student’s dreams for a preferred future
  • Helpful tool to use when developing individualized program plans as a part of the person’s adult services after school

Nebraska’s Person-Centered Planning Efforts

The Division of Developmental Disabilities (DD) is using Charting the LifeCourse (CtLC) as the framework for implementing Person-Centered Planning in Nebraska.

To learn more about DD’s Person-Centered Planning efforts, check out their website.

You will also want to check out all the wonderful free Person-Centered Planning resources on the Charting the LifeCourse (CtLC) website.

Person-Centered Planning Questions to Brainstorm and Discuss

  • What do people like and admire about me?
  • What’s important to me?
  • What are the best ways to support me?
  • What do I want my “good life” to look like? (Vision for What I Want)
  • What is not a “good life”? (What I Don’t Want)

Resource: Life Course Tools

  • What’s working for me? (Abilities, strengths, preferences, successes)
  • What’s not working for me? (Unmet needs, dislikes)
  • What supports do I need?
  • What’s important TO me?
  • What’s important FOR me?

Resource: Maryland.gov