Peter

Peter Gregory has extensive experience in supporting people with disability to move from residential centres and group homes to more personalised living arrangements. He shares some of his learnings, and gives examples from his experiences.

Peter’s perspective on innovative living

Peter recalls how the Community Living Movement emerged in North America. This movement promotes the right of people with disability to live ordinary lives in ordinary places and focusses on “what does it take?” for each person to achieve this right.

Peter has observed, while many changes have occurred since people with disability were grouped together in large institutions, many people with disability continue to live isolated lives, disconnected from personal and meaningful relationships and without opportunities to learn and contribute to their communities.

Peter suggests that asking questions like “what does it take?” or “what does it look like?” can change conversations and enable the lives of people with disability to be enriched. Asking these questions enables us to shift the axis of our perspective on what constitutes support. Rather than thinking about what people with disabilities need to do to be included these questions encourage us to think about what we can to together to make full inclusion a reality. These questions enable us to think creatively about what it would take for people with disabilities to share their lives with people they choose, to engage the people they want to support them, to establish daily routines that reflect their opportunities for social and create pathways into mainstream employment and education and to create a home of their own.

Informal support

Some people with disability are not able to change their lives for the better without the support of others. Peter has seen how a “circle of support” can be very effective in assisting a person to become more connected with their community and lead full and contributing lives. These circles of support help families and individuals with disabilities with creative thinking about possibilities and opportunities to achieve personal lifestyle goals.

Peter says families often feel they cannot be involved in the day to day arrangements for a family member living in supported accommodation. Through the practices and routines that dominate many accommodation settings, families often feel disconnected and isolated from their family member. It is important to encourage and support families and individuals receiving services to be actively involved in key aspects of support including selecting support workers, being involved in establishing patterns of support that achieve key lifestyle goals and exercises choice over the services they want to purchase with their funds.

Peter has also seen families getting together outside of service systems to create living situations for their family members with disability.

For more information about informal support, Peter recommends the following resources: Resourcing Inclusive Communities and Together in Partnership.

Intentional communities

Peter is very interested in intentional communities, which are opportunities for people with and without disability to share their lives together in community. An intentional community is deliberately planned from the outset to have a high degree of social cohesion, team work, shared responsibility and reciprocity. This may occur in a physical location such as an apartment development, a share house or through people living in close proximity and connected to each other. An intentional community is not a group home; it is a community of people who choose to live together as their preferred lifestyle and for the mutual benefit and contribution of all.

Lifeshare

Peter has also seen very successful lifeshare arrangements. There is very little difference between the idea of lifesharing and a share house that many people have lived in. When someone with a disability wants to share their home with another person often the default is a group home with 24/7 staff support. This is regularly complicated by the assumption that this is the only financially viable option for people living with complexity. The lifeshare approach challenges this assumption and reframes the idea of support away from traditional service orientations and towards and approach based on mutual relationships. For example, Peter knows a person with disability who has been living with people without disability for 25 years and another situation of 15 years duration.

Technology

Peter observes “technology doesn’t liberate people, context does”. Some devices enable people to be more independent in managing their day to day living. However often devices need to made or adjusted to suit the individual person.

Peter recommends the following:

• Scott and Daniel Harry—Scott and Daniel Harry are living their lives as they want.
• Matthew Ellis and Libby Ellis—Matthew’s sister Libby describes his experiences moving towards an ‘ordinary life’ which includes living in his own community, in his own home surrounded by people who he chooses.

Views and experiences included on this site do not necessarily reflect the views of the Queensland Government or indicate a commitment to a particular course of action.