Natural Supports: What and Why
Most human service professionals understand the importance of family, community and peer relationships in their clients’ lives, but many often struggle to help individuals identify, strengthen and extend their social networks. Strategies to engage and strengthen these supports can be unfamiliar and challenging.
The Natural Supports Framework was developed to address this gap and to move away from a professionalized, system-dependent model toward a community-driven, connection-oriented approach.
Centre for Sexuality and the Natural Supports Framework
In 2012, the Centre for Sexuality and three other youth-serving organizations received funding to explore how Natural Supports could be integrated into practice with youth. This work focused primarily on supporting 2SLGBTQ+ youth and their natural support networks. Many of these youth experience isolation due to homophobia, transphobia, homelessness and rejection by family or peers.
In 2015, we and other Calgary human services agencies formed the Change Collective, a community of practice which over two years tracked implementation successes, challenges and barriers of engaging Natural Supports. In 2017, the Change Collective launched the Natural Supports Framework which outlines foundational constructs and implementation principles.
In 2018, Centre for Sexuality took on the role of lead trainer of the practice framework from the Change Collective Community of Practice facilitators. Since 2018, we have trained over 1,500 professionals across Canada on the framework.
A network of Calgary professionals continues to participate in a Natural Supports Community of Practice that meets quarterly and recently launched Version 3.0 of the framework.
Who are Natural Supports?
Natural supports are the relationships and personal associations we develop throughout our daily lives. They are natural in the sense that they are informal, locally developed and based on reciprocity. In contrast, professional supports are formal, limited in duration and/or structured supports that explicitly involve the delivery of a service (e.g., social worker, psychologist, physician).
Natural supports “enhance the quality and security of life for people,” (Lanterman Developmental Disabilities Services Act, 2016) and may include family, friends, romantic partners, neighbours, coaches, co-workers, teammates, cultural communities, religious communities and other relationships or associations that comprise our social network. These types of supports give us a sense of belonging, identity, security and self-esteem, as well as help meet emotional, physical or instrumental needs.
Our Natural Support Trainings
Centre for Sexuality offers comprehensive training options for human service practitioners seeking to enhance their organization’s capacity to integrate a Natural Supports approach into their professional practice. The core of our work at Centre for Sexuality is to support the development of healthy relationships across the lifespan, and the Natural Supports Framework is a central tool in our approach to supporting our clients and the communities we serve to develop strong social connections through healthy relationship skills.
We have been the lead trainers of the Natural Supports Framework since 2017; we have trained over 1,500 professionals on the Framework including youth-, immigrant- and older adult-serving organizations, as well as with general human services audiences.
Our multi-part training series is tailored for professionals working with individual clients and families. After participating in the first part of the series, participants engage in 6-8 weeks of practicing a Natural Supports approach before the second training. A third training is available on applying a Natural Supports Approach to working with 2SLGBTQ+ clients and communities.