My Plan…My Way

ABS partnered with the University of South Dakota this past spring to create a new service learning project.  USD professors Amy Nelson and Becky Wolff contacted ABS to inquire about partnering with their health sciences students to gain experience working with different populations.  From there the My Plan…My Way project developed.  The students were given a brief introduction on using person centered tools to gather information about people.  The students worked in pairs to get to know a person supported by ABS.  They used different person centered tools to learn about what was important to that person and balancing that with what was important for them.  They also worked to identify what the person’s goals are and how they want their life to look.  The second part of the project was to take the information they learned and put it into a creative format that the person could share with their team members.  The teams will then incorporate that information into the person’s individual service plan.  At the end of the course, the 14 people supported by ABS and the 29 USD students presented their final projects.  The projects ranged from videos, power points, poster boards and scrapbooks.  The project was a huge hit with the students and both ABS and USD look forward to continuing with My Plan…My Way for many years to come.