I am adding two more items to the resources on the topic of person-centered planning, this time exclusively from the workshop of John O’Brien, one of the most important authors dedicated to practical issues of social inclusion and fulfillment of the rights of people with disabilities, who has influenced countless people around the world.
In 2008 and 2014, we had the opportunity to experience John personally in Prague, where he led workshops dedicated to the core values of person-centered planning and the way to use this concept in practice to transform the nature of services and generally help and support for people with disabilities and, by extension, for other marginalized groups of the population.
Although John unfortunately died suddenly at the end of June 2025, we can still draw from the incredible wealth of ideas contained in the many of his texts and podcasts and videos in which he appeared as a guest.
The Origins of Person-Centered Planning with People with Developmental Disabilities
The 2021 text traces the emergence and development of person-centered planning as a concept that was born on the margins of social care systems in networks of activists, families, and people with intellectual disabilities (in American terminology, developmental disabilities) in Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom since the 1970s.
In the text, John explains person-centered planning as a practical response to the limits of institutional care and the medical model of services, which – as is currently the case in the Czech Republic – was being transferred to smaller services emerging instead of large-capacity institutional facilities.
I believe that you will also be interested in an overview of the origins of key ideas, actors, and sources of inspiration that shaped person-centered planning. And that you will also appreciate the naming of the differences between the original meaning of the concept and its later “institutionalization” in mainstream social care systems, when person-centered planning was widely used as a tool for systemic reforms.
The conclusion is positive, where John offers a way to use person-centered planning as a social innovation at the basic (individual) level for systemic change, while preserving the essence of this approach.
The full article can be found in the library here.
For your interest, you can listen to a roughly sixteen-minute podcast created by artificial intelligence based on this text by John.
Interview witch John O’Brien
During John’s first stay in Prague, we filmed an interview with him, originally intended for an educational video, which unfortunately never came to fruition. You can at least listen to a roughly twelve-minute clip in which John answers basic questions about the concept of person-centered planning. He discusses the essence of this approach, how to put it into practice, how it differs from other styles of individual planning, the importance of natural support, and the role of self-advocates.
Originally in English, the video has Czech subtitles.
