VISION PLANNING FAQs

WHAT IS VISION PLANNING?

Vision Planning is the first essential step toward creating a comprehensive Special Needs Plan.

Your Vision Plan helps you paint a picture of what a great life looks like for your child today, tomorrow, and every day in the future. What this means is — your Vision Plan will describe your hopes, goals, and dreams for your child, as well as his or her hopes, goals, and dreams.

Your Vision Plan is the foundation and backbone of your entire special needs planning process. Every planning decision that you make throughout the other four areas of planning should come back to and align with your loved one’s Vision Plan.

WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF VISION PLANNING?

The true benefits of creating a Vision Plan are that:

1. You will have a clearly defined purpose for creating a special needs plan,
2. You’ll know the destination that your planning is aiming for, and
3. You’ll be motivated to complete the remaining four steps of the special needs planning process to ensure that your vision becomes a reality.

WHAT QUESTIONS SHOULD MY VISION PLAN ANSWER?

Your Vision Plan should include answers to questions such as:

• What are your hopes and dreams for your child’s abundant life?
• What abilities do you see in him or her that you want to encourage and nurture?
• What does a great life for your child look like now, in 10-15 years, and in 25+ years?

HOW OFTEN SHOULD I UPDATE MY VISION PLAN?

We highly encourage families to update their loved one’s Vision Plan every year, as key details are likely to change over time. Also, when your child is ready, we encourage you to include them in your planning process. It is their life you’re planning for, after all. Thus, it’s important to understand what they envision for their life today and their future.

HOW DO I LEARN MORE ABOUT VISION PLANNING?

To learn more about Vision Planning, check out our blog post Vision Planning: What’s Your Vision of a Great Life for Your Child?

HOW DOES THE ENABLE VISION PLAN TOOL WORK?

The ENABLE Vision Plan tool is fully guided and makes it EASY for families to create Vision Plans by chatting with the ENABLE team and walking through a series of interactive questions about their hopes and dreams for the future.

After completing the online questionnaire, the Vision Plan tool auto-creates a fully designed Vision Plan PDF describing the family’s vision for their child’s GREAT life.

This document is downloadable and sharable. It is also stored inside the family’s secure, online planning portal. As life events happen and details about their child and their vision for the future change, families can log back into their planning portal accounts and easily edit and update their Vision Plans.

The ENABLE Vision Plan tool is available at the ENABLE website. Learn more here: https://enablesnp.com/purchase-services/

Let’s Start Planning!

Ok! You’re ready to create a Vision Plan for your loved one with special needs. Just follow the steps below to start planning!

1. Review the following list of questions and begin brainstorming answers to each question:
   What are your hopes and dreams for your child’s abundant life?
   What does a GREAT life look like for your child, in terms of their level of
independence, social life, spiritual life, education, job or vocation, home environment, etc.?
   What abilities do you see in your child that you want to encourage and nurture?
   What does a great life for your child look like now, in 10-15 years, and in 25+ years?
   What has been your child’s greatest accomplishment to date?
          o Why do you feel that this is his or her greatest accomplishment?
          o What made it such a great accomplishment?
          o Did your son or daughter see this as a great accomplishment, too?
2. Share the above list of questions with everyone who you’d like to be involved in your Vision Planning process. You may want to include your child’s grandparents or other close relatives, family friends, teachers, doctors, therapists, coaches, etc. – anyone who knows your child well, loves them, and would like to help contribute to them living a GREAT life. This group can be as large or small as you’d like. Share the list of questions with your son or daughter if he or she is able to contribute to envisioning a great life for him- or her- self!
3.  Schedule a time to meet with all of the individuals who you’ve shared this list of Vision Planning questions with to discuss them and receive feedback. Set a specific amount of time for this discussion (90 minutes to two hours usually works well!)
4.  Assign someone to facilitate this discussion. You may want to lead the discussion or you may feel more comfortable assigning a more neutral observer to the role of facilitator. The facilitator will make sure everyone has a chance to voice their opinion and will keep the discussion moving and on schedule, so as to not overburden any of the individuals you’ve asked to participate in the meeting.
5.  Assign someone to take notes on your planning session. Again, you may want to play this role of notetaker – or you may want to assign this role to someone else who is less intimately tied to the conversation so that you’re free to simply participate. In addition to having someone take notes, it can also be helpful to audio or video record your session so that you can go back later to review the discussion.
6.  Hold your Vision Planning session. Your facilitator will make sure everyone has a chance to contribute to the conversation and share their vision of what a great life could look like for your child. All ideas are good ideas at this stage. But as the parent, remember, you will ultimately make the final decisions about your child’s future plan, with his or her input, as appropriate.
7.  After your Vision Planning meeting, clearly document all of the responses from your session and share the document with the group participants. If you’ve determined specific roles and tasks for everyone to play to help your child make progress toward your vision of a great life, make sure everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities moving forward.
8.  Review and update your Vision Plan every year as your son or daughter grows and develops and your/their hopes, goals, and dreams change.

To help make sure you’ve thought through everything, we’ve created a BONUS Vision Plan checklist for you to use. Download this guide by clicking the yellow "Send me my FREE copy!" button below to receive access to the checklist now.