Self-Determination Program

The one-sentence answer

The Self-Determination Program is a way of receiving California regional center services in which you are given an individual budget and decide for yourself how to spend it — rather than receiving services the regional center has arranged and purchased on your behalf.

Why people choose it — and the reason is more concrete than "choice"

Nearly every description of this program says it offers more choice and control. True, but it does not explain anything. The real answer is structural, and it comes down to two mechanisms.

1. A much larger pool of people and businesses you can actually use

In traditional regional center services, you can only use vendors who are vendored directly with the regional center. Becoming such a vendor is an extensive process — so extensive that it deters a great many community businesses, tutors, coaches, classes, programs and small providers from ever starting. They do not refuse to serve people with disabilities; they decline the paperwork, and the effect is the same: they are not available to you.

In the Self-Determination Program, vendors are vendored through your FMS instead, and the requirements are far lighter. That single difference brings a large number of ordinary community resources within reach — ones that would never have completed regional center vendorization.

This is the part most explanations miss. The choice in Self-Determination is not mainly about being allowed to choose. It is that there is dramatically more to choose from, because the barrier that kept providers out has been lowered. See vendorization.

2. You can hire people directly, and set what they are paid

In Self-Determination you can employ your own staff and set their wages, rather than accepting whoever an agency sends. For most families this is the single biggest change in day-to-day life: you choose the actual person who walks through your door, and you can pay competitively for someone you want to keep.

It also makes you an employer, which is a real job with real obligations — see employer burden, paid sick leave and the related entries.

Those are the two largest reasons. There are others, but a family weighing whether to enter the program is usually weighing these.

For the detail-oriented

Statutory basis: Welfare and Institutions Code section 4685.8. The program is administered through California's 21 regional centers under the Department of Developmental Services.

The core machinery: an individual budget is calculated for you, you build a spending plan describing how you intend to use it, and a financial management service handles the money — paying vendors, or employing your staff with you, depending on the model you choose.

Where the vendorization contrast comes from, and what it rests on. The statutory basis above is DDS's. The comparison between the two vendorization routes is not. It rests on operating experience — Brian Torum, who holds FMS vendorization with 19 of the 21 regional centers for Sentinel Four, the provider that publishes this site.

That is testimony, not a document you can look up, and it comes from an interested party. We believe it is accurate and we have found nothing that contradicts it; we have also checked the one DDS directive that looked like it might narrow the contrast, D-2025-Regional Center Operations-004REV (Standardized Vendorization), and it does not bear on vendors being vendored through an FMS. But you should weigh a structural argument differently when the people making it benefit from it, and we would rather say so than let you find out later.

Still to come: the two requirement sets side by side, so the contrast can be checked line by line instead of taken on our word. See vendorization.