How Self-Determination Gives You the Freedom to Live Your Life
Want to get support how you want it? When you want it? Where you want it? By people you trust?
With the Self-Determination Program, you can. Self-determination (let's call it SDP) helps people with disabilities choose their services, stay in their home and community, and hire people they trust.
For example, you could live at home and hire a parent, grandparent, or friend to help with day-to-day activities. And if one of your daily activities is going to the beach? Well, you can hire your friend to drive you there and support you while you surf.
The point of SDP is to allow you live your life—and provide the support you need every day. This makes SDP a great choice instead of nursing homes or group homes. Because SDP gives you independence and choice.
You being in charge is important—because you know yourself (and your needs) better than anyone else.
Why is self-determination a better option for me?
There are a lot of awesome things about the Self-Determination Program. Here's some of the highlights.
- Plan your own life and make your own decisions
- Choose how to spend your funding on services and supports
- Get full authority to hire, manage, and fire the people who support you
- Provide the highest possible wages to the people who support you
- Select benefit options for the people who support you (PTO, health insurance, 401K)
- Schedule the people who support you
- Control training requirements
- See your budget reports in real time
- Submit time using an app
How does self-determination work?
This section is about the more complicated stuff (like Medi-Cal). Rather than getting traditional Medicaid (also called Medi-Cal) support for disabilities, you can see if you can enroll in Self-Determination Program (SDP) instead.
See, self-determination is all about giving people more choice about how they want to get their support. To do this, you must become your own "business." You can then hire "staff" to support you and manage your own budget, services, and activities.
Obviously, this comes with some decision-making and paperwork. Best news? GT is here to help.
How does GT Independence make the complicated stuff easy?
Your job is to be the boss, choose who you want to hire, pick out your services, and train the people who support you. Our job at GT Independence is called financial management services.
This means that you decide what kind of support you want—we take care of the details. You hire people you know and trust. We handle all the boring (and complicated) stuff for you. Like timesheets, paychecks, payroll taxes, and help with liability and worker's comp insurance.
How to Get Started
Ready to learn more about the self-determination program? Here's some easy action steps you can take.
- Contact your California regional center (find yours here)
- Work with your regional center to find out if you meet the requirements
- Work with your regional center to find a program that best suits your needs
- Choose GT Independence as your financial management services (FMS) provider and begin self-determination
You deserve to live the life you choose. GT is here to make that easier. Learn more about how we can support you at gtindependence.com/ca.
