The Life Options Project - Person Centred Planning
Life Options provides Person Centred Planning for young people with learning disabilities who live within Carmarthenshire. Initially funded from the 'Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund', Life Options rceves funding from Carmathenshire County Council and is managed by Learning Disability Wales.
Life Options supports young people and their families in making the choices that will help them lead good and happy lives.
Contact Life Options
For more information please contact Steph Harnett at Learning Disability Wales by email or by telephoning 029 2068 1160 / Mobile 07809 119222.
Why We Use Person Centred Planning
Person Centred Planning is a range of approaches (or 'tools') that can be used separately or together to help individuals or families to think about their lives.
They have been developed mainly because the assessment and individual planning systems used by professionals are not very good for involving the person themselves and they tend to focus on fitting people into services rather than looking at individually tailored options.
Person Centred Planning turns this around by asking 'how can we involve you in looking at your future?' and 'what do you want out of life?'
There are a number of 'tools' that you can learn to use and these include: Personal Portfolios, Maps. Path, Personal Futures Planning, Essential Lifestyle Planning and Individual Service Design.
To find out more about Person Centred Planning we have prepared an introuductory leaflet, which includes more information on the 'tools', a list of useful resources and contact details for organisations that provide resources and training.
Click here to Download "Introduction to Person Centred Planning - Practical approaches to enable people to think about and choose their life options"
We have also prepared an easy to read presentation on how Life Options can help you, your friend or your child, choose and get a good life.
Click here to Download "How to choose and get, a good life for yourself, your child or your friend".
To download right-click on the link and select 'Save Target As' from the menu'.
Stories Wall - Person Centred Planning in Action
The 'stories wall' contains snippets from real-life transition stories. Many families who are preparing for transition, or who are already experiencing it, find the stories wall to be a valuable resource for accessing the real heart of transition from a personal perspective.
Peter
Peter wanted to leave home and learn all about the catering industry. He worked hard making a plan and has used it as a way to ask for help to achieve his ambition.
We don't know yet if he will go to his first choice of college, but he has also made some decisions about how he will achieve his object of a job in catering using local resources.
Four Young Women
Four young women are due to leave college. They didn't know quite what was available to them after college and they didn't know how to get the support they needed to access the sort of lives they wanted.
They are working together on exploring both their career options and their choices in other areas of their lives. They will be able to use the person centred facilitator to advocate for them to help get the things they need
John
John is due to leave school soon. He has profound autism and a severe learning disability and does not communicate conventionally.
Life Options have worked with him to enable him to choose where he wants to go to college and where he wants to live. He has an essential lifestyle plan which he can use to explain to people what he wants and needs, this is particularly important for John as there are several noises that he finds difficult to cope with. Using the plan which is easy to read and full of pictures, everyone knows what to do to keep him safe and happy
Donald
Donald has been away at school for a number of years. He comes home in the holidays. The Life Options project has been working with him and his family and he has been able to choose where he would like to live when he leaves school as well as what he wants to do with his time.
He has some really different ambitions that are on the way to being realised. He is planning on spending some of his days doing some voluntary work on a local farm charity as well as pursuing his musical ambitions and singing with a local rock band.
Ellen
Ellen is a strong and determined young lady with a love of music and of her favourite comedians. Using a person centred approach she and her family chose where she wanted to make some changes in her life. She had been finding it hard making friends as she lives in a fairly remote area. Her sister would go out and socialise but things were not so simple for Ellen.
Now she is being supported by both friends and family to go out and visit with the families of several school friends, and has started a belly dancing class. Ellen hopes to go to a local college when she leaves school so that she can remain in contact with her friends.
Heulwen
Heulwen moved to Carmarthenshire fairly recently. Life Options helped her write her own Essential Lifestyle Plan and then helped her to use it to ask for the support she needed.
Heulwen enjoys exploring old buildings and likes to join with a local history society when they have field meetings. She uses her support to achieve this and combine her days out with providing her Mother with some much needed respite
