By Paul Roberts, Executive Director, Positive Futures
I sometimes feel as though I’ve spent more than thirty years trying to unpick the meanings of words most people take for granted. “Care.” “Support.” “Service user.” Words that slip off the tongue yet carry assumptions about the people they describe and those doing the describing.
My journey into social care began long before I understood how powerful those words were. In the late 1980s, I was a young social worker in the northwest of England, immersed in the ongoing debates about the divide between health and social care. It was a time of boundary drawing and disagreements, but what struck me most was how arguments were often disguised as definitions. Whether someone was “ill” or “in need”, whether a task was “clinical” or “domestic”, whether funding followed a “case” or supported a person, it all too often seemed to come down to language.
Those early experiences led me into advocacy, community work, and the rights-based movements emerging in Liverpool and Manchester. I gravitated toward people exploring ideas we now call person-centred thinking, influenced by pioneers like John O’Brien and Wolf Wolfensberger. Their insistence that services should be organised around people’s needs and wishes rather than people being expected to just fit into what was provided, never left me.
Northern Ireland: Returning to a System That Spoke a Different Language
When I returned to Northern Ireland in 1992, the contrast was striking. I remember explaining to someone that I worked in advocacy, only to be met with: “What’s advocacy?” We were still operating in a system heavily influenced by institutional thinking, and the medical model.
When Agnes Lunny, then my manager, now our CEO and I came together to form Positive Futures in 1995 we were united on our belief that services should fit around people, not the other way around. We arrived at that belief through different routes, but the connection was immediate. People’s rights were not an optional extra, but the foundation of our work.
Those early days were full of moments that reminded us how much language reveals. Systems spoke about “beds”, “placements” and “cases”. Rarely did anyone ask about families, friends or aspirations. People were moved, placed, processed; their lives described in shorthand and jargon. We knew that we wanted to build something different, and the language we used has always been central.
Why the Words We Use Matter More Than We Admit
If someone is described as a “placement”, we place them.
If they become a “case”, we process them.
If we label them “challenging”, we brace for difficulty before we even meet the person. Similarly, if people are “service users” the perception is they do not contribute to their community or if someone’s placement fails, it is because they didn’t do what was wanted or expected of them.
Conversely, when we use the language of citizenship, relationships, possibility and home, we begin to build services and lives that reflect those things.
That is why the Social Care Future movement speaks to me. Their vision, that each of us should be able to “live in the place we call home, with the people and things we love, in communities where we look out for each other, doing the things that matter to us,” captures the humanity that sits at the heart of all good support.
Their Changing the Story work recognises a difficult truth: that unless we change the public story about social care – how it is spoken about, imagined, and understood, service reform will always lag people’s desire for a good life. Their efforts to reshape the narrative, grounded in research and storytelling, mirror what many of us have witnessed for decades: that language is not decorative, but instead a driver of change.
The Pull Toward Gloriously Ordinary Language
The Gloriously Ordinary Language programme takes this even further. Their simple question. “Would you use this language around your kitchen table?” cuts straight to the problem. They point out, quite rightly, that too much of our professional speech feels clinical, bureaucratic, or detached from the everyday world.
Their focus on purpose, people and practice challenges organisations to rethink both the tone and the thinking behind their words. Many teams across the GB are apparently now working through how to rehumanise language so that it reflects real relationships and real lives, not transactions or processes.
At Positive Futures, that instinct has been part of our DNA for nearly three decades. For example, we don’t use the term “client” or service user” here; we talk about “John” or “Mary” or the “people we support”. I know we can all be guilty of using grandiose language in our job descriptions or policies and that is something we are always looking to address throughout the organisation. But in how we work with the people we support and our person-centred approach to social care, we have been unwavering.
Doing With, Not Doing For: A Lifelong Lesson
One of the biggest shifts in my thinking came when I realised that “care”, as most people understood it, was often rooted in “doing for” someone. Lighting the fire. Making the meal. Ensuring safety. All important tasks but they can easily overshadow the person’s own agency.
True support is about doing with; walking alongside someone, recognising their talent, believing in their capabilities, and understanding their hopes and dreams. Language signals whether we see people as passive recipients or active citizens. It shapes what staff believe their role is.
Our approach is grounded in that belief that people should not simply receive a service, but be empowered to shape their own future, with choice, control and connection at the centre. A variety of person-centred tools are used throughout what we do to help us learn and understand what a “perfect week” looks like for each person. By thinking about what each person would like to do with their support, we can work out what is achievable to enable them to strive for the life they want.
The future for Positive Futures
As Positive Futures celebrates its thirtieth year, I’ve been reflecting on how person‑centred practice has evolved and how it still needs to. With our CEO, Agnes Lunny, preparing to retire at the end of 2026 after more than three decades of leadership, this feels like the right moment to reaffirm the values we were founded on. It’s also why we’re so pleased to be working again with Helen Sanderson as we look to the future.
In many ways, this work brings us back to our roots — to the belief Agnes and I shared from the beginning: people’s lives should shape the services that support them, not the other way around.
Reconnecting with our roots: working with Helen Sanderson
Our long relationship with Helen Sanderson has helped us stay grounded in person‑centred values. Helen has consistently challenged us to look not only at how we support people, but also at how we support our staff. If we expect person‑centred practice in services, we must model it in our teams. That principle shapes our culture as much as it shapes our practice.
This year, we’ll be deepening that relationship. Helen will lead an intensive programme focused on the full breadth of person‑centred approaches — from team agreements and thoughtful job roles to Positive and Productive Meetings and person‑centred supervision. Psychological safety will run through all of this, creating the conditions for honesty, creativity and learning. It’s the foundation of authentic person‑centred work.
By May 2026, we expect to have a clearer picture of how person‑centred practice should live not just in what we do, but in how we lead and behave. Our full senior team will be involved to ensure this becomes embedded throughout the organisation.
For those unfamiliar with her background: Helen brings more than thirty years of experience, has authored over twenty books, and pioneered tools such as One‑Page Profiles and Person‑Centred Reviews. She worked with us in the early days to develop our person-centred approach to the people we support and our staff, and our Positive and Productive Meetings model — approaches that still sit at the heart of how we work today.
Emerging Directions — A Taste of What’s to Come
Over the last year, several themes have begun to surface in conversations across the organisation, sign-pointing areas that may need more attention and that will shape our work with Helen.
We’ve been asking ourselves how consistently we use person‑centred tools, what “good” staff supervision and meetings look like, and how confident teams feel in using things like one‑page profiles or team agreements. We’ve also reflected on how well our recruitment and induction processes reflect our values.
Turning reflection into direction
This is where the upcoming workshops with Helen Sanderson will be so valuable. Over the next few months, people from across Positive Futures will come together to explore, what’s working well, where practice is inconsistent, and what person‑centred work looks like in our day‑to‑day lives.
These workshops will test our thinking, challenge old habits and help us understand what needs to shift so that our values show up not only in our language, but in our actions.
The insights from this process will shape the plan we develop. It won’t be a glossy statement, it will be a practical, evidence‑based framework that reflects real voices and real practice.
Doing with, not doing for, what it means today
“Doing with” has been core to our approach for decades, but it’s something we must continue to pay attention to. The pressures of the social care system can easily push us back toward rotas, tasks and paperwork. The workshops will help us look honestly at where “doing with” is strong, where it’s slipping, and what teams need to do to keep this principle alive. This isn’t about adding more forms or processes. It’s about building confidence, clarity and connection that enable genuine person‑centred work.
As we move into this next stage with a new CEO, one thing is clear: we’re not reinventing who we are. We’re strengthening the Positive Futures legacy. Our aim is simple – to make sure our founding values aren’t just present in how we talk or the language we use, but visible in everything that we do. We want to be able to evidence our person‑centred approach to help us improve and remain accountable and demonstrate to the people we support, their families, regulators and commissioners what matters most: that people’s lives and choices come first.
For now, we’re doing what good person‑centred organisations do — listening, reflecting and preparing for the next step.