Social services and supports for people with disabilities —and other groups in situations of dependency— have traditionally been organized from an institutional logic, offering standardized responses that often fail to consider people’s real preferences and needs. This approach has limited access to an autonomous, fulfilling life connected to the community.

In contrast to this model, two key ideas are emerging with great transformative potential: self-directed supports and personal budgets.

Self-directed supports place the person at the center, recognizing their right to decide how they want to be supported, by whom, and in what they want to invest their supports. It is a model that champions freedom, autonomy, and decision-making capacity, and understands that supports must adapt to the person’s life — not the other way around.

The main tool to achieve this goal is personal budgets, which consist of allocating a financial resource that the person can use flexibly to configure the supports best suited to their life project. This model goes beyond the rigidity of pre-assigned supports, such as fixed placements in centers, and opens the door to more meaningful, community-based, and personalized options.

This shift in perspective not only improves people’s quality of life, but also promotes a structural transformation of the social services system: toward a logic of trust, personalization, and co-production. It is a true paradigm shift that involves professionals, administrations, and communities, and places people’s dignity and will at the heart of social action.

In this Innobreak, we will reflect on the potential of self-directed supports and personal budgets through two pioneering initiatives that are already paving the way in their territories.

• Individualised Funding (New Zeland): A support system that, through a personal budget, allows people with disabilities to decide how, when, and with whom they receive their supports. With the guidance of agents —mostly volunteers— users can design their own life plan and gain autonomy, independence, and freedom of choice.

• Pilotaje de Apoyos Autodirigidos (Spain): a pilot project that explores, with a small group of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, how a support system based on personal budgets could work. The goal is to assess its viability as an alternative to current services and to investigate what would be needed to make the model sustainable.

SPEAKERS

Simon Anderson, Marketing and Relationship Team Lead in Manawanui (New Zelanda)

Amalia San Román, technical coordinator at Plena Inclusión España, and Núria Ambrós, social consultant (Spain)