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Living Values

Making advance care planning relevant and accessible.

Everyone deserves dignity—in life and after they die. Living Values is a design research effort to empower underrepresented communities to record advance care planning decisions for their last days and beyond.

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The Living Values team is a group of university and community researchers who believe that everyone deserves dignity at the end of life. We are working to remove barriers to end-of-life discussions and planning for all people.

Decisions
Every day, we all make decisions. Small ones. Big ones.
  • Take time off from work to be in a best friend's wedding?
  • Which bills to pay this month and which to delay?
  • How to get the kids to school this week?
Some decisions can be made easily while others are tougher and require a lot of thought. Either way, making decisions is a big part of daily life.
Planning Ahead
Future events are hard to predict, including the last days of life.
  • Living with diabetes.
  • A motorcycle accident causes life-threatening injuries.
  • Travel with a good friend during retirement.
Everybody dies, and thinking about what could happen can be scary. Some things can be planned but sometimes life takes surprising turns.
Personal Touches
Decisions for a person's last days are complicated and personal. They can include medical, financial, spiritual, and relationship matters.
  • Level of medical treatment to receive.
  • Who should care for surviving children.
  • Memorial ceremony preferences.
These decisions clarify what should happen during a person's last days and the ones after their body dies.
Unique Needs, Dignity for All
Everybody deserves to have their personal choices for the end of their lives honored.
  • No matter how much money they have or make.
  • Regardless of how people identify themselves and whom they choose to love.
  • Any race, ethnicity, or cultural heritage.
We all have different stories, different preferences, and different ways of seeing the world. This uniqueness matters during life and also after it.
Take Time to Choose
Starting early by setting goals, values, and priorities for living can help make decisions for one's last days easier to make.
  • Please make sure our children get our money and things.
  • If I can't talk, I want my partner to know I love him forever.
  • I'd like to be at home and comfortable if my body can not be healed.
Thinking about and recording how you want to live is important. If these are not shared, then no one will know.
A Great Need
Most Americans haven't made these decisions for living. They often don't know where to start and the process can be confusing.
Through the Living Values research project, we hope to learn what keeps people from starting and how to create meaningful solutions that can help.

Project Team

profile picture of jennifer heston
Gerontology
Miami University
Design
Miami University
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Philosophy
Thomas More University

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