1.1: John O'Brien- A Genealogy of Person-Centered Planning With People With Developmental Disabilities
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By a variety of names, person-centered planning is an element in social care reform, as in these examples. The US Department of Health and Human Services set person-centered planning at the center of disbursement for the nation’s main source of social care funding (DHHS, 2014; NQF, 2020). The Act that establishes publicly funded services for people with developmental disabilities in the Canadian Province of Ontario established person-directed planning as the forum for selecting and coordinating services (S.0., 2008). Valuing People, an initiative to transform supports to people with learning disabilities* in England, identified person-centered planning as a necessary tool for changing systems of support (Routledge, Sanderson, and Greig, 2002).
These mainstream instances of person-centered planning happen as elements in centrally managed public service reforms. In contrast, this genealogy traces the origin of a person-centered planning lineage that emerged at the edge of social care systems, among a network of activists aligned with people with developmental disabilities and their families in Canada, the US, and the UK from about 1970 through about 1986. Approaches to person-centered planning which emerged then influenced the design of other methods. Some are still practiced in evolved forms. These approaches, along with many others, have had some influence on the mainstream practices adopted by systems (for a description of these early approaches, their commonalities, differences, and offspring see O’Brien et al. 2014). Retrieving the origins of this tradition highlights sources of social innovation that can contribute to social care system reform, if those engineering the reforms choose to learn from them and make room for such conditions to flourish.
This genealogy is constructed from my current reflections on memories of active participation in this network, aided by review of materials from that time and more systematic inquiries compiled from interviews with a number of person-centered planning innovators (Lyle O’Brien and O’Brien, 2002; O’Brien and Blessing, 2011).
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.