COGWORLD
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Now Available:
Surviving Cogworld?
Supporting People with Developmental Disabilities
In a Mechanistic System
by John O'Brien
Surviving Cogworld?
Supporting People with Developmental Disabilities
In a Mechanistic System
by John O'Brien
![Picture](/uploads/2/8/9/4/2894191/____1409708299.jpg)
John O'Brien is a leading thinker who has written widely in the field of disability. He is a pioneer and lifelong advocate of person-centered planning. His values-based approach emphasizes learning with each person about the direction their lives could take, challenging and overcoming practices, structures and values that lead to segregation and underestimation rather than inclusion, and an approach to change in people's lives based on 'imagining better'. His thinking is based on Social Role Valorization and the Social Model of Disability. He is an Associate Editor of Mental Retardation, and on the advisory boards of the Georgia Advocacy Office and Georgia PASS.
In Wisconsin we have systems of long-term support that sometimes blossom in ways that make room for people with disabilities to take the opportunity to be engaged, productive, connected, and successful. When these opportunities open, it is not by random accident. It happens when people who rely on support have the investment of others who care about them to capably assist in propelling the person’s vision of what could be.
Successfully assisting in the person’s pursuit of such a vision requires skills that may seem, on their face, contradictory. On the one hand, successful assistance can make opportunity bloom when the person relying on the assistance has confidence that the supporting person shares that vision and engages in partnership with the person to achieve it. On the other hand, successful assistance, when that assistance includes resources from systems of long-term support, requires savvy management of the opportunities that can be plucked from a sometimes unyielding system.
John O’Brien is a close observer of the systems of long term support in Wisconsin that have opened opportunities for people with disabilities to engage in life, relationships, and community. In a paper commissioned by the Developmental Disabilities Network, O’Brien notes with alarm that a convergence of trends threatens to reduce the delivery of long term care services to a mechanistic series of transactions that put a forceful squeeze on the kind of supportive relationships that allow individuals to flourish and connect. O’Brien describes the resulting reality as “cogworld” and offers a cautionary view of a dystopian system that reduces a person to a defined set of needs and limits the boundaries of support to the remedy of functional deficits. You may download your copy of O’Brien’s paper, Surviving Cogworld? Supporting People with Developmental Disabilities in a Mechanistic System.
This May, the Developmental Disabilities Network will host exploratory sessions led by O’Brien in which he will define “cogworld” and guide the audience in a thoughtful, productive, and ultimately hopeful discussion of strategies to balance the bureaucratic inevitability of “cogworld” with the human necessity of shaping support in terms of relationship and capacity development.
More information on O’Brien’s COGWORLD sessions will appear here soon at the DDN website.
Contributed by: Howard Mandeville
In Wisconsin we have systems of long-term support that sometimes blossom in ways that make room for people with disabilities to take the opportunity to be engaged, productive, connected, and successful. When these opportunities open, it is not by random accident. It happens when people who rely on support have the investment of others who care about them to capably assist in propelling the person’s vision of what could be.
Successfully assisting in the person’s pursuit of such a vision requires skills that may seem, on their face, contradictory. On the one hand, successful assistance can make opportunity bloom when the person relying on the assistance has confidence that the supporting person shares that vision and engages in partnership with the person to achieve it. On the other hand, successful assistance, when that assistance includes resources from systems of long-term support, requires savvy management of the opportunities that can be plucked from a sometimes unyielding system.
John O’Brien is a close observer of the systems of long term support in Wisconsin that have opened opportunities for people with disabilities to engage in life, relationships, and community. In a paper commissioned by the Developmental Disabilities Network, O’Brien notes with alarm that a convergence of trends threatens to reduce the delivery of long term care services to a mechanistic series of transactions that put a forceful squeeze on the kind of supportive relationships that allow individuals to flourish and connect. O’Brien describes the resulting reality as “cogworld” and offers a cautionary view of a dystopian system that reduces a person to a defined set of needs and limits the boundaries of support to the remedy of functional deficits. You may download your copy of O’Brien’s paper, Surviving Cogworld? Supporting People with Developmental Disabilities in a Mechanistic System.
This May, the Developmental Disabilities Network will host exploratory sessions led by O’Brien in which he will define “cogworld” and guide the audience in a thoughtful, productive, and ultimately hopeful discussion of strategies to balance the bureaucratic inevitability of “cogworld” with the human necessity of shaping support in terms of relationship and capacity development.
More information on O’Brien’s COGWORLD sessions will appear here soon at the DDN website.
Contributed by: Howard Mandeville
Peter Leidy - "It's a Cogworld"
It's a Cogworld from dna on Vimeo.
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