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DSD Service System · Foundations
What it means for a person to direct their own supports, where the independent living movement came from and what it asks of a service system, and how to support a decision without taking it over.
50–55 minutes · 5 lessons · Voluntary learning
Learn what a self-directed option changes about who decides, who employs and who holds the budget, and what stays the same.
Understand the independent living philosophy as a set of commitments made by disabled people, and what those commitments ask of a public agency.
Learn how to respond to a choice you would not make in a way that keeps the person's authority intact and your obligations met.
Learn the difference between helping a person decide and deciding for them, and how to tell which one is happening.
Review your own practice for the places where support has become substitution, and leave with one change.
Find one decision in the last month that you made on behalf of a person who could have made it with support, and work out what support would have been needed.
Self-direction is easy to endorse and harder to practice, because practicing it means letting a person make a choice you would not have made. This module covers what self-directed services are and what they are not, where the independent living philosophy came from and why it still matters to a state agency, what dignity of risk asks of staff, how supported decision-making differs from deciding for someone, and how to review your own practice for the places where support has quietly become substitution. Nothing here is scored, ranked or collected.
The question is never whether a person can decide. It is what support it would take for them to.
Keep the authority over a person's supports and life with the person, and put support around the decisions they make rather than in place of them.
Run the decision-support review on one person and change how their next decision is made.
Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
State program information on services for Minnesotans with disabilities, including self-directed service options.
Minnesota's plan for supporting people with disabilities to live, learn, work and participate in the most integrated setting, including commitments on person-centered planning and self-determination.
Federal description of home and community-based services, including self-directed service delivery and person-centered planning requirements.
Federal description of the independent living program and the consumer-controlled centers it funds.
Resources on supported decision-making as an alternative to guardianship, including state-by-state information.
State council offering guidance and technical assistance on disability access and policy in Minnesota.