PRINCIPLES FOR INDIVIDUALIZED SERVICES
by John O'Brien

This is based on the discussions at a conference sponsored for OMRDD by the Center on Human Policy in July, 1994.

Assist people with developmental disabilities to develop their individual abilities and personal interests

Discover and respond to individual choices

Support important personal relationships and encourage positive participation in community life

Deal effectively with people's vulnerabilities

Promote personal and organizational learning which leads to continual improvement of service provider ability to make these four essential contributions

The life-long need for competent assistance with the individual effects of disability and the pervasive effects of prejudice make people with developmental disabilities especially vulnerable, and this vulnerability is often compounded by the effects of poverty, community breakdown, and discrimination based on cultural differences.

Committed respect for the dignity and rights of each person with a developmental disability requires willingness to get to know and respond to each person as a changing individual. The way to gain this vital knowledge is to attend carefully to each person's interests, preferences and choices, and to join each person in creating positive opportunities to pursue them. Some people will challenge our ability to understand their interests and choices, and some people will challenge us to understand and respond to their positive potentials despite dangerous or difficult behavior. But by far the greatest challenge to the current service system is utilizing available resources in ways that respond effectively and flexibly to each person's individual requirements for assistance in assuming their responsibilities as a citizen and as a community member.

Offering people with developmental disabilities decent living conditions and reasonable opportunities calls for significant learning and major change at every level of our service system. We must contend with:

• massive past investment in programs and administrative structures whose mission was to oversee and control groups of people with developmental disabilities
  

• rapid growth in knowledge of how to best serve people with developmental disabilities
  

• the large scale of our service system as a whole and the size and organizational complexity of many service providing agencies
  

• feelings of helplessness at the magnitude of our task, or cynicism about our capacity to deal with the conflicting interests that shape our services, or pessimism about our capacity to recruit and retain decent and able people to provide services.
  

To continually improve our capacity to support people with developmental disabilities, we commit ourselves to the disciplined application of the following questions to all of our activities from assisting people with their daily routine to long range planning for the service system as a whole. If we are disciplined in applying these questions, we will identify problems worth solving and solutions worth implementing. In consequence of this, we will steadily increase investment in activities that prove effective, and discover growing satisfaction on the part of people whose expectations for themselves is rising.

• How does this activity increase our capacity as service providers to assist people's development?
  

• How does this activity increase our capacity as service providers to discover and respond to individual choice?
  

• How does this activity increase our capacity as service providers to support important personal relationships and to encourage positive participation in community life?
  

• How does this activity increase our capacity as service providers to deal effectively with people's vulnerabilities?
  

• How does this activity increase our capacity as service providers to continually improve our ability to assist development, respond to choice, strengthen important relationships, and deal with risk?
  

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