An important part of developing your vision and planning for the future is to create and record the FASD person’s circle of support. 

These are also referred to as 'intentional networks'. Building a strong network of family, friends, healthcare providers, and community organisations to provide assistance and encouragement is really important for a number of reasons. 

Lived experience tells us that most FASD individuals become socially isolated when they leave school and become adults. When this transition happens they mainly get to interact and engage with paid support workers, not people that have chosen to have a social relationship with them … and our people with FASD are well aware of this fact. Developing a trusted circle of support is a way of protecting them from social isolation, loneliness, potential manipulation and abuse.

When developing your circle, the intention is to include, wherever possible, people who have a genuine interest in their friendship or regularly maintaining a social link with them. You are also looking to include people who are prepared to make a long-term commitment to stay in their lives in some way, and people who will look out for their safety, particularly from manipulation, victimisation and abuse. 

Support roles should remain the responsibility of the professionals in their lives – well as much as possible.  You also need to consider the age of members of your circle of support because the purpose is that these social links remain in place well after you have died. 

We acknowledge that developing natural circles of support for people with FASD as adults is often difficult.

Reasons for this include:

• The parents and caregivers themselves tend to have become socially isolated during FASD childhood and adolescence due to the challenging symptoms associated with FASD, lack of societal understanding and stigma, and failures in every sector to accommodate the FASD symptoms.
  
  
• The FASD individual usually has few friends or social contacts anyway for the same reasons given above.
  
  
• Many people are not prepared to make a commitment to stay in a FASD person’s life because they know how hard and challenging it can be.

Don’t let this stop you from recording the circle of support you have at the time you are developing your shared vision. Relationships change in our lives all the time. Remember, the vision plan is a living document that you can review and change at any time.

Here are a couple of resources that might help you develop your circle of support:

• A Guide to Circles of Support
• Circles of Support - A manual for getting started

Here you can link to a template to help you record your circle of support: Circles of Support - template 

There are more templates available online. Choose one that works for you.