Our Person-Centered Approach
Employment Links serves Duluth, MN, and provides Person-Centered Services. This means we place emphasis on transforming the options available to an individual, rather than on “fixing” or changing the individual. It is a set of approaches designed to assist persons in planning for their life, and then providing support towards achieving their goals. Employment Links aims to discover and act on what is important to the individual, ensuring that persons with barriers have choices in their daily lives. Contact us today to learn more and get started!
What are Person-Centered Services?
Person-centered services is an approach to providing services based on social and individual empowerment. In summary, services that are Person-Centered place emphasis on transforming the options available to an individual, rather than on “fixing” or changing the individual. It is a set of approaches designed to assist persons in planning for their life, and providing support towards achieving their goals.
How do Person-Centered Services Work?
Person-centered service providers such as Employment Links discover and act on what is important to the individual, ensuring that persons with disabilities have choices in their daily lives.
Services that are Person-Centered place emphasis on continual listening and learning, focusing on what is important to the individual both now and in the future. Such conversations and supports include family, friends, social workers, case managers, home staff, guardians, employment support agency, and all other significant people in the individual’s life. Person-centered services involve the individual receiving the service (and other persons listed above) in developing a CSSP (Coordinated Services and Supports Plan) that allows for community participation and quality of life for the individual. In contrast, traditional models of planning have focused on the person’s deficits and negative behaviors, labeling the person and creating a dis-empowering mindset from the start.
A CSSP (Coordinated Services and Supports Plan) for each person is updated as and when the person and their team decide that changes are needed or wanted, or when a goal outcome is achieved. In this scenario, the new plan goes into effect after the individual’s semi-annual (or annual) team meeting.
There are five key areas that are important in shaping an individual’s quality of life. Services are evaluated based upon how they enable the individual to:
- Share ordinary places
- Make choices
- Develop abilities
- Be treated with respect and have a valued social role
- Grow in relationships
Why does Employment Links Provide Person-Centered Services?
Person-centered services offer an alternative to traditional methods, placing the individual at the center of the decision-making. The process focuses on discovering the person’s gifts, skills and capabilities, and on listening and conversing about what is really important to the person. The person-centered approach is based on the values of human rights, independence, and social inclusion. The services are designed to enable individuals to direct their own services and support in a personalized, empowering way.
It is essential that Employment Links’ staff make a commitment to strive for person-centeredness in all of their activities with Individuals. However, it is equally important that Employment Links’ staff understand what the person’s CSSP states and to follow that plan without deviation, since the Individual and their team created this plan based on what the Individual has decided he or she wants to achieve.
Person-centered thinking challenges us all to actively listen to the people we serve and to those who know them best in order to understand what they want for their lives. This enables us to help support the individual in ways that will increase their success at living as independently as they are able, and allows them to contribute to the extent that they choose to community life, including finding and maintaining paid community-based jobs, if that is what they choose.
Services Offered:
Our flexible programming offers a variety of services that allows for a great deal of creativity in designing individual Person-Centered plans. The length and content of each program depend on the needs and goals of each person. Periodic evaluations are made to determine the proper progression to the next phase. Employment Links staff will evaluate the current level of independence and assist in providing opportunities for growth while developing and exercising age-appropriate skills, decision making, and daily living choices at home, and in the community.
Employment Exploration Services
Community-based services that introduce people with disabilities to employment options and allow them to explore their options through work experiences. This service helps people to make an informed choice about working in competitive, integrated employment.
Employment Development Services
Individualized services that help people find competitive, integrated employment or attain self-employment.
Employment Support Services
Individualized services and supports that help people to maintain community employment in an individual or group arrangement.
Structured Day
Structured days and community integration allow for individuals to learn how to appropriately utilize their local community resources and activities.
Independent Living Skills
Employment Links staff will evaluate the current level of independence and assist in providing opportunities for growth, while developing and exercising age-appropriate skills, decision making, and daily living choices at home, and in the community.
Professional Development Groups
Employment Links offers a variety of rotating topics, each covering a multitude of professional development outcomes, running in 8-12 week sessions. Our small groups are specifically formatted to integrate individuals into the workforce and community, while continuously helping them to grow personally and professionally.