Transform and Empower learning path:
diversity, care and innovation
Program description and outcomes
Transform and Empower is a practice-based learning path that combines personal and professional development for people active in organisations and communities that support people with complex needs. This course assists you to develop your innate abilities and strengths as:
- A role model and coach of self-empowerment, choice and participation
- A generator of good atmosphere, good-hearted relationships and discovery
- A contributing member of a creative, responsive and energising team
- A Personal Outcomes practitioner, using your innate strengths to achieve self-directed results and solutions for people you support, and yourself
The program is suitable for anyone working with and interested in the self-empowerment of people, diversity and collaboration in caring, innovative communities.
Module 1
CQL Personal Outcome Measures discovery and assessment tool: A practice-based introduction
We define quality of life person by person, in context of social relationships and in community.The Council on Quality and Leadership believes that knowledge about people is the foundation for delivering quality services. Information gathering starts with the person's perspective on their own life, and is then referenced to the responsiveness of organisational supports and systems as enablers and enhancers of quality. The workshop offers the tools and hands-on experience you need to conduct a baseline assessment and measure progress over time. The workshop covers how to conduct the Personal Outcome Interview, synthesize interview data from people served and from those who know them best, analyse findings, and identify organisational needs for change. With a clear understanding of what people want and need from the services and supports they receive — their Personal Outcomes — we can marshall resources toward that end.
Resources
Go to The Council on Quality and Leadership
Module 2
A great life that’s a safe life for me, you and us: Sustaining well-being, recognising and preventing abuse
Feeling welcomed and valued builds a basis for dignity, good atmosphere and social creativity. We will review changes in societal attitudes about people with disabilities, and shift our focus from disability to a diversity perspective for enriching our lives and our communities. Due to the high incidence of exploitation among people receiving services, we will explore an understanding of how power works in relationships. We will discover hidden powers within each of us; gifts and strengths that are waiting to be discovered and used, and are needed to grow a whole community.
Downloadable readings
T. Ha Vinh - War, conflict and healing: a buddhist perpective.
Guy Legare - The Healing Process: the power of the environment,
Sobsey and Mansell - Prevention of sexual abuse of people with developmental disabilities
McCarthy and Thompson - Sexual Abuse by Design: an examination of the issues in learning disability services
G. Focht-New - Beyond Abuse - treatment approaches for people with disabilities
J. Wolfson - Sexual assault in the lives of adults with an intellectual disability: a community response
Council on Quality and Leadership Introduction to CQL Personal Outcome measures approach - J. Wolfson
Lemay - Deinstitutionalisation of people with developmental disabilities: a review of the literature In Canadian journal of community mental health, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring 2009
Beth Barol - Introduction to Positive Approaches
Module 3
Positive approaches in attitude and action: Supporting people with autism, trauma and mental illness
Sometimes we are puzzled about how to support a person with challenging behaviors. We will review critical aspects in the typical development of a child contrasted with the development of a child with neurological and social challenges, as backdrop to the vital therapeutic relationship between caregiver and person. The Biographical Timeline can be a valuable tool to explore the effects of trauma and mental illness, discover meaning behind actions and help the team rally to support the person. We will review how mental illness and neurological differences, including the autism spectrum, complicate working with people and the role of therapeutic modalities including counseling, group work, music, art, alternative modes of communication, sensory integration and neuropsychology.
Downloadable readings
B. Barol PhD - Overview of positive apporaches Overview of Positive Approaches. In Positive Approaches Journal, Pa, USA, Vol 1 No.1 1996 pp. 1-3
B. Barol PhD - Learning from a person's biography: introduction to the biographical timeline process
G. Focht- New - Expanding our expectations: Individual and group counselling as effective therapy with people who have disabilities
G. Focht-New and B. Barol - Persons with developmental disability exposed to interpersonal violence and crime: strategies and guidance for assessment
G. Focht-New and B. Barol - Persons with developmental disability exposed to interpersonal violence and crime: approaches for intervention
B. Barol - Introduction to Positive Approaches In Positive Approaches Journal, Volume 1 No.1 1998
Module 4
Leader of my own life: Expanding options and opportunities for choice
We will think beyond the program mindset and explore ways to assist people with limited life experience to expand options and opportunities, based on their definition of what really matters. Making new relationships with people in the broader community who are willing to offer work, leisure, companionship and learning alongside a person with a similar interest, can be energizing for everyone involved. We will discover ways people can shine in meaningful social roles that increase self-worth and status in their own eyes and the eyes of others, including in advocacy and management roles. We will review creative ways to encourage self-expression and dialogue suited to people with diverse communication styles, such as pictures, theatre and in contact with nature.
Downloadable readings
Dee, L., Devecchi, C & Florian, L with Cochrane, S (2008). Being, having and doing: Theories of learning and adults with learning difficulties.
Module 5
Friends and relationships: Intimacy with myself, with you and with us
Intimacy, friendships, relationships and sexuality are natural highlights in being a person for many. For people with limits imposed on these experiences, love and sexuality may be connected with prejudice, secretiveness and shame. As practitioners, our own love experiences and mindsets affect how we approach the relationship and sexual needs of others. We will discover how to create an easy atmosphere to approach preference and diversity, friends and pleasure, needs and autonomy, the rules of adult behavior and give accurate and accessible information. Loneliness has many faces. Meeting new people and making friends is important. Equally important is the ability to connect with ones deepest self as a comforting and wise friend. We will review methods and tools to access inner strengths that can help to endure and recover from times of loss, grief, falling out, moving on; integrating sorrows and joys as part of being a whole person in good company with others.
Downloadable readings
D' aegher and Wong - meeting the needs of people with severe disabilities: the person, the helper and the process, Sydney: Healthrites.
J Wolfson - Sexuality education as a path of social action
Quality in practice - Intimacy, Dating, Marriage. Council on Quality and Leadership
J. Wolfson - My Helping hand: a template for learning about conditional trust and getting help.
Module 6
Bringing it all together
We will harvest the learning in multiple ways. We will review practical results, skills and tangible achievements at personal, team and organisational levels. We will track our new-found abilities to be aware of the feelings and atmosphere that influence the way we view each other, our teams and ourselves. We will discover our personal and collective visions as evolutionary spirits guiding us forward, and the inner fire that sustains them. We will identify ways to anchor insights on our personal and professional path, and explore opportunities for continuous learning and development in our role, and as a community of practice.
Related readings
Mindell A 1994, Leader as martial artist: techniques and strategies for resolving conflict and creating community, Chapters 1–4, Harper, San Francisco.
Plant, A - Community development and identity, in Camphill Correspondence, July-August 2009
Rosenberg, M 2003, Nonviolent Communication: A language for life, PuddleDancer Press, Encinitas.
Scharmer, CO 2007, Theory U: Executive summary - Addressing the blind spot of our time. Leading from the future as it emerges, The Social Technology of Presencing, Presencing Institute, LLC, USA.
Wolfson, J (2008). Chapter 7: Threefold magic, in Turning myself forward: the personal story that led to the transform and empower approach. Turning Forward publications
Background
Transform and Empower attitudes and methods put equal emphasis on measurable results, relationships and team atmosphere, and each person’s inner fire that gives meaning and power for the journey. Courses have evolved during 30 years working with people in service-oriented community organizations on five continents. In recent decades, social practitioners, organisational leaders and people receiving services and their families are becoming part of an emerging global mindset in which principles of human rights, community and inclusion, and person-centred methods are defining regulatory requirements and practice in human service organizations. An important shift has occurred in how the human service sector defines quality of life - from programs delivered in a residential facility to the self-defined outcomes of a person; from a pre-determined community of location to a self-determined network of relationships and opportunities in which each person can be a valued participant, friend, neighbour and contributor.
Keeping vision and values of dignity, respect and reciprocity alive is the heartbeat and life force of fresh practice and partnerships. People can feel weighed down by the maze of reporting and accountability structures that can seem isolating and irrelevant to the real work with people. The outer pressures have also opened up adventurous, enjoyable opportunities to work together and build relationships with unlikely partners – people in government, funding bodies business enterprises, other human service organizations, community groups and active citizens with an attitude of mutual respect, reciprocity and trust in sharing resources, strengths and solutions. Together can be more fun, interesting and deeply sustaining than alone. Transform and Empower offers some perspectives, methods and tools to bring more flow, joy and ease along the way.
Sources
Transform and Empower stands on the shoulders of many individuals with complex needs who have been part of its evolving journey. Into this rich tapestry of people’s stories and dreams, three influences weave their way through the content and process of Transform and Empower program.
Spiritual Science as pioneered by Steiner and colleagues, acknowledges human experience as having physical, soul and spiritual dimensions in the journey towards inner and outer freedom. As Zayonc puts it: ‘If we fail to attend to the interior of self and the world, then indeed, half the world is missed’.
Freire, social scientist, developed a method of education as liberation through literacy: ‘Education [is] the practice of freedom … the means by which [we] deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of [our] world. The greatest humanistic and historical task of the oppressed is to liberate themselves...’
Deep Democracy, pioneered by Mindell and colleagues, gives equal emphasis to facts, feelings and inner fire in personal experience, in relationships and in whole communities as part of the evolving journey of humanity. According to Schupbach, ‘Deep Democracy … refers to an openness towards the views of other people and groups. It also embraces emotions and personal experiences that are most often excluded. Nowadays, in organizational transformation, personal and professional development are inseparable’.
Continue to the next course: Facilitators Certificate