This week is Australia's National Volunteer Week and so HSA Australia team member Tara Cantwell has decided to share some thoughts on the topic.

I'm a bit of a zealot when it comes to the 'good stuff' volunteering creates for people, so it saddens me that some members of our community find it tricky to get involved and stay involved. A "buzz word" for people not missing out in their community is inclusion.  But the word is so weighed down with formal associations of forced participation, in government policy, schools and even volunteering, that it's almost redundant as a positive concept.

As a notion, it's also aiming a bit low I think.   My thesaurus gives me an alternative word of inclusion - presence. At HSA we think there's more than just 'inclusion' and 'presence', that these are just the beginning of a person's journey to have positive control over their experiences in their communities.

At Interchange Outer East they use one-page profiles to increase inclusion for those volunteering.  For volunteers with disabilities and volunteers from a different cultural background, these profiles introduce people into their team in a positive way.  It also helps clearly spell out any particular things they want/need in terms of support in a way that cuts the barriers to volunteering.

In top tips on how to support Linda, she says "I might need help reminding me about a couple of things, like phones being away. Please remind me if I have forgotten". Alyse says, "having an upset tummy is daily life for me, please don't send me home". Thu is volunteering from the local Migrant Information Centre and says, "I always like to work hard and have something new to learn".

So they've covered the first step for 'inclusion' and 'presence' but what about contribution?  The 'presence to contribution' tool is perhaps a vital next step.  Designed to figure out how to move from positive introductions to powerful contributions for all involved. Contributions that lead to the life changing experiences we know volunteering is all about. No potential volunteer should miss out on that and no community should miss out on the contribution of that volunteer.

For more information

Migrant Information Centre East Melbourne

http://www.miceastmelb.com.au

Interchange Outer East

http://www.ioe.org.au

Helen Sanderson Associates

HSA Australia team member Tara Cantwell has written our blog for this month.

I was a teenager once, a shy, silly creature. Yet, at age 14 I began volunteering with an organization, supporting children with disabilities on camps and fun day activities. It changed my life, created my career and helped form the very person I am today. This same organization, Interchange Outer East have been working with HSA and have started developing one-page profiles for their current group of recreation volunteers. This group seem a whole lot savvier than me, however the deceptively simple one-page profile is still doing great things.

As many people working with person-centred thinking skills know, a one-page profile has these titles,

• What do others like and admire about me?
• What's important to me?
• How to support me?

Turning the answers of these questions into a one-page description of a volunteer enables them to tell us exactly the right way in which to support them - therefore revealing the ultimate secret ingredient of how precisely to retain them.

The volunteers at Interchange attacked their descriptions with gusto at the recent volunteer camp (a camp just for them as appreciation and professional development).

http://www.ioe.org.au/volunteer-camp-2013.html

Rather than see it as more bureaucratic paperwork, volunteers are telling people that they are excited to be listened to and to be asked for their opinions. Volunteers enjoy telling their peers what they admire about them and perhaps not surprisingly, they are passing on this positive attitude and ability to see one's admirable attributes, to the children they are volunteering with.  An active culture of appreciation is forming.

So as momentum gathers with this team and its quest for support that is person-centred, what are Interchange Outer East's next steps for the recreation volunteers?  Ensuring all 400 recreation volunteers have a one-page profile!  We'll keep you posted…

This month I had every intention of writing a blog on Individualised funding but the location in which I began writing has changed my focus. I am sitting in the gardens outside the airport in Canberra - which for those from afar, is Australia's capital city and the hub of all things political. The airport reflects that, it is very well planned and rather modern in its look. There are mainly people flying in and out for parliamentary reasons present and unlike most other airports attention has been paid to the outside space, hence me being able to wait for my flight in a very well manicured garden. I looked up from my computer and saw the most fantastic thing and it was that experience that changed the focus of my blog to the idea of 'Taking Notice'.

I witnessed a man impeccably dressed in a well tailored suit come outside with his briefcase, place it down and then remove his shoes and socks taking great care to place them neatly by the case to then walk out into the middle of the grass. He simply stood there quietly looking around and occasionally taking a few steps in different directions. He did this for about fifteen minutes while all around him people rushed about dressed in a similar manner. They all looked rushed and focused on to their next meeting or the flight they had to catch. He then proceeded to put his shoes and socks back on and walk away.

One of the headings of the 5 Ways of wellbeing is Take Notice and it's funny how so many people in training struggle with such a seemingly small thing.  When talking about planning with individuals they support or even thinking about their own life, it often seems easier to clarify what "good busy" looks like then the idea of being in the moment and taking notice of your surroundings. It's the "smell the roses" part of our days and weeks that you can't necessarily plan for but need to allow space to happen. It's not about people doing nothing and being bored and it's certainly not something we can always fit neatly into a weekly timetable, but something that can help us to connect to our surroundings. It's the extra moment to take your shoes off on the grass, notice the latest flower in the garden or even stop while on your way to catch a train to listen to the beautiful music coming from a busker that that could well be playing in a concert hall.

There was an experiment a few years ago involving violinist Joshua Bell, who plays to audiences who pay around $100 a ticket to hear him. Joshua took his violin to a DC subway for an hour and only 6 people stopped for a short amount of time, the rest paid no attention. He played for an hour and very few people stopped to hear one of the best violinists in the world because they were too busy to take notice. Whilst the experience was partially about perception and taste it was also about priorities and whether or not we stop to appreciate things.

My experience with the barefoot suited man has if nothing else made me think about whether I need to sometimes take my shoes off in the grass more often figuratively speaking, rather than having my head down on the computer.

Over the last 18 months HSA Australia has been involved in supporting staff from The Department of Ageing Disability and Home Care to learn about and implement a new planning policy. The new policy is set to launch later this month so I've been taking some time to reflect on what these changes mean in a practical sense beyond the idea of simply a new policy.

Last week I got to hear about some of those changes as I came to the end of a set of action learning workshops with a group of ADHC staff. Some of the staff teams came along prepared to share the work that they've been doing and reflect on their own experience applying a different approach to planning within their teams and with the people they support.

One of the main things that has been reinforced to me in the last couple of months is the difference in quality of both listening and planning when you give staff different ways to gather information with people and support them to develop these skills. When this paired with balancing guidelines and the importance of quality, with the importance of being flexible and creative, staff are able to focus on the reason for planning with people and not just the "final product". Too often quality is measured by how many boxes are ticked, how many goals have been set or what paperwork has been completed. Even though these are often set with best intentions they can sometimes end up clouding what the work is really all about and that's where the risk of "going through the motions" arises.

When I first met the most recent teams I have been working with, they were obviously passionate about their jobs and wanted to do the best for people they support, but felt unsure about how to move to a more flexible approach to planning and still maintain quality. There were also concerns about getting it wrong and how many tools to use. Now as confidence levels grow, creative work is coming through and there is a level of collaboration with all involved that people are starting to understand as being essential to planning. The quality is there but people are looking at quality of information, quality of outcomes and the quality of listening not the amount of attachments they have filled in.

People sometimes struggle planning with individuals who have complex / non-verbal communication. A couple of teams who supported people who have that label had set themselves some actions to explore communication and to be mindful of looking / listening for it in their day-to-day work. The outcomes have been communication charts and profiles starting to take shape where there was limited information, people noticing communication that they had not picked up on before and new ideas for opportunities for individuals based on what they are communicating. One team noticed small gestures and facial expressions with someone that they had not noticed before, another team discovered that someone they supported understands basic sign language and are hoping to build on that over time.

The focus on connecting people to communities that make sense to them has really come through as people are moving away from the quantity of hours someone spends "in the community" to how meaningful this is for each person. One group spoke about the connections someone they support is making at her local gym and the contribution she makes, as everyone is motivated by her enthusiasm and enjoy working out when she is there.

What is emerging from all of this is staff focusing on quality because they see it as important to supporting people to have positive control over their lives and because they are looking at planning as important and helpful and not just another task that is on the list of things to do. The stories that I'm hearing have, simply put, been about people getting a life and not just a new planning process.

This month's blog has been written by Tara Cantwell.

Not long after I had twins, I started wishing someone close to me would also have twins.  I longingly imagined sharing my perceived groundbreaking experiences, advice they couldn't live without and my now defunct twin breastfeeding pillow.  When my longest, dearest friend Sarah announced her twin pregnancy, my excitement was hard to contain. Until I realized the only thing I had any right to impart was my feeding pillow.   So instead of burdening her with my expectations and advice I set about finding out exactly what good support looked like for her.

Step one was a few hours working together on a relationship map to identify who Sarah's main supports were.  This laid out visually a small army of supporters waiting just for her.  We then converted the negative reputation exercise to look at her specific fears around having twins and ultimately, who and how we can support her with that.

Step two was to share some of this newfound knowledge at the beautiful baby shower Sarah's sisters threw her.  I took the opportunity to tell everyone what good support looked like for Sarah and I think we were all relieved to know we wouldn't be overstepping (or underperforming) in our support. And then, because not only do twins mean double the love and cuddles, but double the hormones, mothers guilt and self doubt - we all wrote on a poster on the wall, what we like and admire about Sarah.

All these handy tips about supporting Sarah will be reviewed regularly in the next year as her twins take everyone on an exciting new journey.

This month's blog comes from Amanda Jones, stepping in for Deb while she's on maternity leave (no news yet, stay tuned!).

I've been thinking a lot lately about the concept of working within your sphere of influence.  It's one thing that people often struggle with when we are looking at person centred change within organisations. It can be a tricky balance to focus on what you can do something about when the things outside of that sphere seem overwhelming.

When we are helping people to look at the levels of change needed within the workplace, organisation, or at a larger systems level, I notice how much people get caught up in what they can't do when action planning, which often leaves a smaller amount of time for good thinking about their own sphere of influence. It's a balance; we can't ignore issues just because they are beyond our control, but need to be strategic about who we pass this on to and how we do it. We also can't just "do nothing" because the task seems overwhelming.

I was watching a documentary recently that to me not only illustrates the idea of working with in your sphere of influence, but also thinking creatively about opportunities. In the Lamu Archipelago there are a group of people for whom several issues were well beyond their control.  Political unrest in the region made it difficult to make a living from the source they relied on (tourism);

The confluence of ocean currents that washed up thousands of rubber flip flops (thongs if you're an Aussie) which littered the beaches and adversely effected their wildlife. This has led to a campaign to raise awareness across the world about the impact of irresponsible rubbish disposal - clearly amongst the larger examples of taking a massive issue and doing something about it.  However, this is clearly something that is going to take time, and doesn't have an immediate impact on the ability of the local people to make a viable living.  The changes needed in this area have come from another idea that was well within their control. They make art. There is now a whole industry in the area that offers fair trade employment, education and opportunities for people using the very problem they were faced with.  UniquEco  www.theffrc.com (flip flop recycling company) makes sculptures, jewelry and even gumboots out of the rubbish that was washing up on their beaches.

I'm not saying that we can all make wonderful art out of the things beyond our sphere of influence but I do think that we could be more creative about what we do and how proactive we are about the things we can change.

At the Inclusion Conference at Ribby Hall in the UK in 2005, one of the presenters, Ken Jupp, began by stating that there were two types of people in the world that scared him - people who have no sense of humour, and people who think that they're right.  This has come back to me time and time again in the years since, and they're words that I've been pondering a lot lately.  One of the things that our work in disability services tends to leave us with is certainty of the value of people with disabilities and the contributions they can make to our communities.  It is easy to forget that while a lot of the population may also believe this in theory, there are circumstances that test this out.  Transferring the benefits of our experiences to others who have not known people with a disability is incredibly difficult, and we've got to answer the question of when it is, and is not appropriate to even try.  Until recently, I had thought this primarily relates to the decisions raised by pre-natal diagnosis, but I've since become aware of another similar situation.

Good friends of mine have been involved in fostering for the past few years, with an aim to gaining permanent care, and eventual adoption of a baby.  For some time they have been waiting for the right opportunity to come along - as you may imagine, there are many circumstances involved, including a system designed to only grant permanent care when the birth family are absolutely certain that they are willing to give up care of the child.  My friends were recently offered a young baby to foster, and it looked highly likely that this could lead to permanent care.  They have a large amount of information to make sense of as they make their decision.  The baby's mother has an intellectual disability, already has 2 children in foster care, one with an intellectual disability, and the other showing signs of speech delay issues.  No information has been provided about the likelihood of the baby having a disability.

My friends got in touch with me to ask my views given my experience with people with disabilities.  My first instinct is to want to convince them that everything will be okay, as I know how much and for how long they have wanted to have a child.  At the same time, I want to be able to help them to understand that even if the child happens to have disabilities, they will love him/her anyway, and that at least I will be able to support them well in the years to come.  Having spent so much of my life trying to shape positive attitudes towards disability, it takes an enormous amount of control to suspend that approach and instead just listen to the dilemma faced by my friends - I'm acutely aware of the danger of pushing a righteous view right now.  My own thoughts are clouded by wondering what will happen to the baby if my friends don't go ahead, about the sort of support the birth mother is receiving after having her third child permanently taken from her care, and how she is being supported with this decision.

My friends don't necessarily want to hear about the sorts of positive lives that can be lead by people with disabilities and they don't necessarily want to be introduced to families of people with a disability to hear about their lived experience. They want statistics about inheritance patterns of intellectual disability, and some kind of guidance as to how to calculate the possible risk they could be taking.

Our work is undeniably about listening well to people and helping them to make their own decisions.  Yet I frequently hear judgements from people who are steeped in person centred thinking and planning, dealt out about people who have made the decision not to go ahead with a pregnancy following a prenatal diagnosis of disability.  I follow 'Noah's Dad' the Facebook page that is passionately promoting all the positives of raising a child with Downs Syndrome.  It is doing the most remarkable job of communicating the joys of day to day life, and I can imagine it being a fantastic source of encouragement to other parents of children with Downs Syndrome.  Changing perceptions of people with Downs Syndrome is certainly a clear aim of the site.  Whether or not they would also hope that this would lead to more people feeling confident to go ahead with a pregnancy knowing that their child will have Downs Syndrome, I can't say. I have however seen a lot of comments posted on the site from people pushing this line very strongly, and with no small amount of criticism and judgement.

I'm honestly not sure that I've been very helpful to my friends.  I've given them the names of a couple of organisations that might be able to help them make sense of things, and I've suggested a couple of person centred thinking/coaching tools for the same reason (hopes and fears, circle of influence).  I have tried to remain positive and hopeful through our conversations but tried not to push that too much for fear of this being interpreted as pressure to make the decision to go ahead.  I don't know what decision they have made/will make, I only hope that whichever way they go, they have some sense of certainty, and feel well supported with whatever comes next.

Being asked to support someone with a decision like this feels like the ultimate challenge to support positive control and not push our own views.  I'm not sure I've passed the test, but it's left me concerned about the need for us to explore these sorts of issues to ensure we use our experience, skills and knowledge at the right times and in respectful ways, and know when to keep quiet and listen.  I know that I am not alone in feeling passionate about promoting the contributions of people with disabilities. I think we often see our greatest challenge as countering prejudice and ignorance, whereas my experience of supporting my friends now has me thinking that our biggest challenge may be suspending righteousness and judgement as we employ person centred practices in supporting people with difficult decisions in our personal lives as well as our work.

This month's blog has been written by Amanda Jones.

What does it take to move from words to actions?  Moving from the "what" to the "how".

In training we often talk about the idea of "don't just do something sit there" to help people think about the importance of conversation and not jumping into action without first having all the information.  We often use a quote from Einstein to illustrate this: "If I had an hour to save the world I'd spend 55 minutes defining the problem".

I wonder if Einstein would have adjusted his timings if he then had to set actions that others needed to be involved in and not just himself.  Actions need to mean something to those responsible and be clear, so that they almost act as a recipe with the end product being what will be achieved.

If I was given an action plan to implement that said - Action: "Save the world," By when? ASAP, Who's responsible? "ALL," apart from the rest of the world being in serious trouble, it would be nearly impossible to implement as I wouldn't know where to start.

I still see a lot of action plans that don't truly match the conversations that people have, and don't reflect the wonderful detail that we see in other areas of a plan. It's almost like the word "action" makes people think they need to stop talking and just get some dates and ideas recorded. There are still issues around the implementation of plans in services and while we can discuss whether or not people see it as part of their role and the culture change that needs to take place, I think a starting point is creating clarity in the way we write down whatever it is we are expecting people to do. It's hard to hold people accountable for following through on actions that are not clear in the first place.

We've started to create more space in training to talk about action plans and some top tips for capturing actions.  A staff member came back to the second day of training recently and shared with the group, that after talking about action plans on the first day of training he went back to work and scrubbed out every action plan that used the term "ongoing" in the 'by when' column, and "all" in the 'who is responsible,' and set his own action to find time to revisit the plans and fill in the missing detail. This was exciting to hear and a great example for others. It is also reflective of the need to look at the step between planning and doing, when we are developing and recording plans.

We find that we spend progressively more time teaching person centred thinking skills, and less time on courses that do actually focus on planning.  Many of the Australian states that have begun to legislate for something akin to person centred planning, have shied away from any mandated proformas, and have generally pushed the message of creativity and individuality in how plans are captured.  I wonder if one of the casualties of this is people actually knowing how to plan and record actions.  Even people who may have been trained to record SMART actions in the past, now seem confused about how this fits into the world of creative and individually tailored planning.  It is becoming evident that while we travel around the country ensuring we share new learning, it is equally important to ensure we revisit the foundational concepts every now and then, even if they do seem like good old common sense.

For a while now I've been curious about how people's parenting styles may impact on their approaches to support work.  A recent comment during person centred thinking training has me pondering this again:

"I've always thought about work with clients in the same way that I've brought up my kids - that they shouldn't be allowed to get away with bad behaviour.  Today has made me think that it's different though.  Maybe sometimes it doesn't matter whether someone gets away with something, because maybe it was us that pushed them to that behaviour in the first place.  In fact, maybe clients are actually making sure that us staff don't get away with something we've done that they see as bad behaviour."

If there are even some people who naturally relate their support work to parenting, perhaps it's helpful to look at the similarities and differences between the two roles to help people think mindfully about the ways they support people.  I am not yet a parent, so I don't claim to be any kind of expert on this, I do have parents though, and I have heard a bunch of people talking about what it means to be a parent, so I'm going to share some thoughts anyway.

Firstly and perhaps obviously, there are important differences according to the age of the person who is receiving support.  I'm yet to meet any adult that really appreciates discipline, lectures, unsolicited nagging or advice from a peer or someone younger than them.  My brothers have been known to remind me of their ages during moments when I've forgotten to credit them with the wisdom to solve their own problems and make their own decisions.  The doughnut could be used with people who may want to let their staff know that they already have parents, and they don't need their paid staff dabbling in that role as well.

When people can transfer parenting experiences of thinking on their feet, juggling multiple demands at the one time, attempting enthusiastic participation in things that they may not necessarily enjoy, and being positive role models, surely this can be helpful.  If people have managed to be the sorts of parents who can step back enough to allow learning from risk and diverse opportunities, while still providing the guidance necessary for making informed choices, they truly do possess helpful skills and experience to contribute to support work.  Parents, who are able to respond with warmth and empathy in the face of what can seem like extreme emotional reactions, also surely bring valuable qualities.

My top 5 beliefs about parenting......................

How does this help in providing an enabling approach to support work? What should I keep doing?...............

How does this get in the way of enabling approaches to support work? What should I change?...................

I wonder if something like this could help people reflect in training or team meetings.  I imagine it could be quite challenging and would need to be facilitated with sensitivity.

The more I look at this, the more unqualified I feel to draw any kind of conclusion from my musings.  Instead, I've found myself moving on to wonder if in fact skills and experience from support work can be used in preparation for parenthood.  When I reflect on my own background in support work, I can at least recall the important tricks for preventing nappy leakage - although, I'm not completely confident that this will translate to the cloth nappies that we've chosen to use.  Perhaps it's tiredness, or the mental fog of pregnancy, but I'm having trouble thinking of tangible things beyond this.  Those of you who have had the opportunity to both be parents and support workers, help me with out with some tips? Where is the crossover?  Where is the link unhelpful? Is hoping that a background in support work will serve as useful preparation for motherhood completely naïve or do I perhaps have some strengths to draw on here?  Fellow trainers, have you asked support workers about their parenting beliefs and had them reflect on how this influences their work?  If so, what have you heard? Is there something we can share more broadly in relation to this?  Email me and let me know, or leave a comment here…

A wise and wonderful friend recently gave me a copy of 'The Happiness Project' by Gretchen Rubin.  Just as Gretchen herself reflects, it is easy to exist in a state of general equilibrium without ever really stopping to reflect on either the things that currently make us happy, or what it would take to be happier.  Gretchen's work on happiness is very thorough and detailed, and there are a number of things from her book that have resounded with me, both in relation to work and my personal life.

Gretchen decided that for her, happiness requires her to "look at my life and think about feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth" (pg 282).  She talks about the countless responses she had to her project that reflected a belief that focusing on one's own happiness is self-indulgent and unlikely to create any significant change in others.  With some embarrassment, I remember my own cheerful declaration as a young person, that being truly happy must somehow reflect a lack of insight into the vast injustices perpetrated by the human race.  I was seeing pure happiness as having more to do with sheer ignorance than deliberate effort.  This was probably a strange sentiment to come from someone whose reputation was for being cheerful, happy and always laughing.  I can only attempt to explain it via the arrogance of youth and a perception that misery and angst are far more interesting than happiness.

Robert Louis Stevenson is quoted in the book as saying that "There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy." This strikes me as an interesting thing to ponder in relation to support work.  What is our role in relation to bringing positivity with us into people's homes and lives?

Rubin's idea that happiness involves 'feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right in an atmosphere of growth' could be a helpful guide for us when working with people. One of our great challenges is helping people to be themselves even though people with disabilities may have experienced everything to push them towards compliance and away from self determination, and people in receipt of aged care or medical services may find themselves encouraged in a similar direction.

At times, I think we can be guilty of focusing solely on what helps people to feel good, forgetting that for most of us, there are things which can be anything from mildly irritating to acutely uncomfortable/ unpleasant, that we may still consider necessary parts of feeling right.  I don't particularly enjoy cooking, cleaning or tidying up, yet having spent 2 weeks away living in hotel rooms, eating delivered food from limited menus, I realise there is something to those domestic duties that contribute to me 'feeling right.'  Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely wary of people postulating that people "need to do their bit just like everyone else," even if it leads them to have to communicate dramatically with their behaviour that it makes no sense to them.  I do wonder though if there's more we can be exploring in relation to this, so long as we keep it in the context of what's important to people and how best to support them.

I think active support gets people thinking about the atmosphere of growth, but too often the focus remains on domestic tasks, rather than real questions of what opportunities can be explored to truly support personal development.

I'm curious to know what others think about using Gretchen Rubin's notion of 'feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right in an atmosphere of growth' to look at how we're doing in supporting people.  (Mind you, the physical growth of my body and my baby feels just about as much as I can deal with right now!)

Leave a comment or email me your thoughts about how we could be using this.