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H e l e n

I hope you may have seen that Celebrating Families has been a very personal work for us. It emerged as my team at Helen Sanderson Associates and I learned, through more than ten years of supporting people with learning disabilities, about person centred thinking and planning. Michael Smull and the Learning Community for Person Centred Practices developed most of these original tools. We quickly saw that the person centred thinking tools we were teaching were just as applicable in our own lives. We would begin our team meetings with stories about how we were using these tools with our families. When I shared what we had been doing with John O’Brien, one of the originators of person centred planning, he challenged me to put our stories in a book. We set ourselves the goal of creating such a book.

M a y e

When Helen asked me if I would be interested in working with her to finish off this book, and I read what she had written, it resonated so much with my personal experiences. Many of her techniques, I saw, were systematic representations of what I had instinctively tried to do with my own children a generation before. What Helen had written also resonated with my professional life: as teacher, trainer, therapist and coach, I have spent around 40 years listening to people talk about their lives. When they spoke, what these women were experiencing in their families always took centre stage. I recognised the value of offering mothers practical help to enhance the quality of their family lives as much as possible - so of course I accepted Helen’s offer to join the project.

The wealth of materials on person centred thinking and planning comes from the Learning Community for Person Centred Practices, and from the pioneers of person centred planning with people with learning disabilities. We would particularly like to acknowledge the contributions of Michael Smull and John O’Brien, who gave us the original idea for this book.

This website is supported by the HSA Foundation Charity.