
Supported Decision Making Resources
These resources are intended to help you learn about and navigate the world of Supported Decision-Making. Some of these resources were created by ONI, but many of them were created by other organizations.
Click on the resource to read a brief summary and follow the link to get access to each one.
If you know of a resource you would like to see included on this page, contact us and let us know: jyoung@ohionetworkforinnovation.com

Helping Children Learn Decision-Making Skills: Adapted from a Scholastic resource, this is a guide helps identify opportunities for children to make decisions at different developmental stages.

Charting the LifeCourse – Tools for Exploring Decision-Making Supports: This tool was designed to assist individuals and supporters with exploring decision making support needs for each life domain.

Misconceptions About Guardianship: A one-page visual that talks about some of the misconceptions we often have about guardianship, and how these lead us to think guardianship is the answer when it often is not.

ONI Supported Decision-Making Agreement: Created by ONI for its partners in the Supported Decision-Making Project, this form can be used to document a person’s chosen supporters, what decisions they will help with, and what that help will look like.

Transition to Adulthood - A Health Care Guide for Youth and Families: From the author: This guide is intended to help young people with disabilities and their families plan for the transition to adulthood in health care contexts. It includes information on how to ensure that young adults have the support they need to make healthcare decisions, how to access continued healthcare coverage and decide which kind of coverage to get, and how to find an adult-oriented doctor.

100 Ways to Use Supported Decision-Making: This one’s pretty self-explanatory. Examples of how to use SDM in different areas of life. A good resource for anyone who is thinking or hearing “That won’t work for me,” when the idea of SDM comes up.

Decision-Making Profile: A quick tool that will be unique to each person. Use it to explore and document the ways that you want help to make decisions.

Supported Decision-Making and Other Less-Restrictive Options At-a-Glance: A two-page guide which presents the basic ideas of Supported Decision-Making in easy-to-digest thumbnail form. Page two presents information about other less-restrictive options in the same format.

Supported Decision-Making -A Quick Reference Guide for Disability Support Workers: This is for staff who work with people with a disability who are making decisions. The guide is about giving staff information to: 1. Think about how they can best support each person to make decisions. This might be by giving them information or understanding how the person communicates. 2. Think about how they can create an environment in which each person can make decisions.

This toolkit is designed to help service coordinators/case managers use Supported Decision-Making with people they support. It is divided into three sections: Laying a Strong Foundation, Capacity to Make Decisions, and Putting it Into Practice and includes links to resources and tools that are ready to use.

The goal of this letter is to help more people with disabilities make their own decisions about their health.

SDM Teams – Setting the Wheels in Motion: From the author, who is a mother of three children with disabilities: This paper is about your options and actions you can take to help your children make their own decisions and direct their own lives to the maximum of their abilities. In this paper, I will present ways to help your children Set the Wheels in Motion toward lives of independence. The journey starts with a question: WHY NOT Guardianship/Conservatorship?

Supported Decision-Making – a Handbook for Supporters: A guided conversation with questions and case studies to help supporters understand and practice their role in helping someone make their own decisions.

Brainstorming Guide: From the author: This tool can help people brainstorm ways that they are already using supported decision-making, and think about new ways supported decision-making could help the person with a disability learn to make her own safe, informed choices.

Supported Decision-Making- A Resource Guide to Less-Restrictive Options: Version 1.0 of a tool developed by ONI for its partners in the Supported Decision-Making Project. This guide includes a wealth of resources for helping people learn about and practice decision-making, and links to additional information. Resources are categorized into different life areas (Money, Home, Work, etc.) for easy navigation.

Assisted Safety Planning Guidebook: From Adult Advocacy Centers: For advocates to use when helping individuals with disabilities as they create a safety plan. The AACs developed the steps to assist the advocate and to ensure that individuals with disabilities feel supported and heard during this process.

Supported Decision-Making – What is it, and how do I do it?: A resource developed by ONI for its partners in the Supported Decision-Making Project. Designed for self-advocates, this tri-fold pamphlet introduces the basic concept of Supported Decision-Making and breaks the process of using it into three easy-to-understand steps.