12 minutes
Natural supports, and how services displace them Learn what natural supports are, why services tend to replace them, and how to support one without professionalizing it.
What you’ll be able to do Explain what natural supports are, describe two ways services displace them, and name one way to support a natural relationship without turning it into a service. Compare the responses to this question and explain your choice: What happened, and what should happen now? Document a next step for Natural supports, and how services displace them: Identify one natural relationship in a person's life and one thing the service does that gets in its way. Help that exists because of who the person is A natural support is help that comes from a relationship rather than a contract. The neighbor who takes in a package. The coworker who explains the new system. The fellow choir member who notices when someone is missing. The friend who calls. These relationships are the substance of belonging, and they have properties services cannot replicate: they are reciprocal, they do not end when funding does, and they exist because the person is valued rather than assigned.
Services displace natural supports without intending to. A worker starts doing what the neighbor did, and the neighbor stops. A schedule fills the week with services, and there is no time left for anyone else. Every request goes through the worker, and the people who might have helped directly learn that they are not needed. Within a few years the person's life contains only paid relationships, and the plan calls this support.
Three ways services displace natural supports Doing what the neighbor did The lift, the shopping, the check-in. Once a worker does it, the neighbor's offer has been declined by default, and it does not come back on its own.
Filling the week A schedule of services leaves no unscheduled time in which a friendship can happen. Belonging is built in the gaps, and the plan closes them.
Making the worker the door Family, neighbors and friends learn to call the worker rather than the person. The person becomes someone who is managed rather than someone who is known.
Supporting a natural relationship means stepping back from it: make the introduction, solve the practical problem, and get out of the way.
Ask what the service could stop doing What you can change You control whether a plan review asks what more the service could do or what it could stop doing so that someone unpaid can. The second question is the one that builds belonging.
What to watch for Do not turn a natural support into a service by paying the neighbor or scheduling the friend. The moment it becomes a service, it becomes something the person is assigned rather than something they have.
Your next step At the next plan review, identify one thing the service does that someone in the person's life could do instead, and ask them.
Carry this forward Natural supports are relationships and help that exist because of who the person is and where they are, not because someone is paid: a neighbor, a coworker, a fellow member, a friend.
Services displace them by doing what a neighbor would have done, by scheduling the person's life so there is no room for them, and by making every relationship go through a worker.
Supporting a natural relationship means stepping back from it: making the introduction, solving the practical problem, and then getting out of the way.
An accordion on displacement, a quote, a scenario decision and a knowledge check.
Identify one natural relationship in a person's life and one thing the service does that gets in its way.
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Previous lesson Next lesson Carry this into practice Why a person can live in the community for years and belong to nothing in it, what natural supports actually are, how to map the places and people that already exist, and how to build one connection that does not depend on a paid worker.
Return to the experience: What did you notice or try, whose perspective informed it, and what would you keep or adjust?
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.
