Chris is the owner of Self Directed Futures and has over 21 years experience of working across the public and voluntary sector in the fields of health, social care and community development with a focus on working with people with learning disabilities to achieve citizenship within their communities. Chris is also a Fellow of the RSA.
As well as working alongside people as a support worker at a grassroots level, in community based supported living projects, Chris has worked at a strategic level in a local authority and on programmes delivering national priorities around helping people move out of institutionalised living environments and into their own homes.
It was within services that Chris started to realise that for people to have good lives they needed approaches to support that were designed around them as unique individuals, and that flexibility, in every area, was key to this.
Even in the community settings, in which he had previously worked, he noticed that organisations (and commissioning systems) could still end up creating the conditions for mini institutions with the needs of staff (fixed rotas and shifts) often dictating how a person’s support was delivered.
It seemed to him that people often had very little control regarding their day to day lives and that staff would regularly fulfil the role of 'paid friends' instead of working creatively to help people build and maintain their own friendships.
Support was often time and task focused and very little effort was put into working alongside people to establish what outcomes they really wanted to achieve in other important areas of their lives.
Chris realised that an asset based approach, focusing on peoples gifts, talents and contributions while working in partnership with people and their communities was something that all commissioners and providers should aspire to create.
It was as a result of this Chris decided to set up Self Directed Futures, an organisation that is based around inspiring and supporting organisations to apply the principles of self determination, citizenship and self directed support.
