If Thousands Have - You Can Too

Why Choose FMS?

Your Family Vision

Community Pathways

Organizing Supports

Managing FMS

FMS is for Your Family if...

You want to design and direct personalized supports, tailored to a vision of a good life, by hiring, directing and paying staff.*
A family member is eligible for PDD services.
Your family’s way of organizing support** includes needs for assistance that fit one or more of these categories:
- Home Living Supports to assist in creating a home.
- Employment Supports to acquire and maintain a paying job.
- Community Access Supports to promote community participation and membership.
- Supports to deal with complex or difficult situations.
A family member, or a person from outside the family, is willing and able to sign a contract called the Family Managed Service Agreement (FMSA). This establishes them as an unpaid Family Managed Services Administrator with these responsibilities:
- Submitting an Individual Support Plan to PDD staff and reporting changes to PDD.
- Hiring, training, and supervising staff.
- Maintaining adequate insurance (ordinary home owner’s or renter’s liability insurance usually meets PDD expectations –sometimes with an increase in the amount of coverage).
- Monitoring to make sure the person gets good quality supports and is healthy and safe.
- Complying with PDD requirements.
- Managing FMS and records according to PDD policy.

Lists like this one can look intimidating to families who are thinking about using FMS. It’s important to remember that thousands of other families have found the work manageable and the benefits significant. Nearly all families say that the time and energy it takes to meet their responsibilities to PDD decreases with experience.

** FMS gives you options about which supports you manage:

You can manage all supports yourself.
You can use government funded service providers & programs for some supports and manage others yourself. For example, some families hire staff to support a person at home while an agency provides employment supports.

**Organizing support is your family’s effort to orchestrate all the necessary supports to success as a person moves through life on community pathways. FMS is only one among many resources.