Good Things Happening Everywhere

I recently came across a story of a restaurant owner in New Mexico that was both exciting and refreshing and thought it was worth passing on.  Please review the attached link below to see the story of Tim.  Tim is a person with a disability that wanted more from life.  His childhood dream was to be a restaurant owner, and with the support of his family he was able to make that dream come true!

http://timsplaceabq.com/about-tim

SRV TRAINING

An important benefit in being involved with the Job Squad community includes educational training.  A few months ago, Brian Connaughton and I attended the Social Role Valorization (SRV) PASSING training provided by the WV Developmental Disabilities Council (DDC).  SRV is a set of approaches designed to enable devalued people in society to experience the Good Life.  These approaches are best used by persons who clearly believe that devaluation of a party is wrong, and who are prepared to work to overcome this.  SRV’s many strategies, derived from practical experience and from what research has revealed, is to help devalued people achieve valued social roles.  It finds that this is the most powerful way to work against devaluation and its negative effects and provides a wide variety of techniques and approaches for doing so.

PASSING is the acronym for 'Program Analysis of Service Systems' Implementation of Normalization Goals. PASSING assesses only the social role valorizing quality of human services, and is especially applicable to services to people with disabilities and/or people devalued for other reasons (eg. group residences, child development centers, special education programs, vocational programs, on-the-job training, rehabilitation settings etc.). Settings such as these will be evaluated by the participants as part of this workshop.

The training is aimed at persons who are or aspire to be leaders in human services, especially in their local area, and especially in bringing about adaptive change. Additionally, the workshop is intended to support individuals who either are, or who are likely to become, deeply committed to devalued people and who wish to use SRV as a guide in their support of those persons. Such support may take many forms but one is an understanding, at a technical level of the changes necessary within human services if people are to experience better lives.

To learn more about SRV and SRV PASSING, go to:  http://www.socialrolevalorization.com/index.html