Webcast on Independent Living -- History and Philosophy Presenters: Paul K. Longmore and Julia Sain April 12, 2004 OPERATOR: Good afternoon and welcome to the IL NET presents Independent Living Movement Where We've Been and Where We're Going conference call. Today's host will be Ms. Kristy Langbehn. With additional speakers, Ms. Julia Sain and Mr. Paul Longmore. During the discussion, all participants will be muted. If you have a question, you may press 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. Your questions will be answered in the order in which it was received. I will turn the call over to Ms. Langbehn. KRISTY: Thanks. Hi, everyone, my name is Kristy Langbehn. We're very glad you could join us on this training, the Independent Living Movement, Where We've Been and Where We're Going. as I'm sure you know this conference call is brought to you by the IL NET which is collaborative project of ILRU and NCIL, the National Council on Independent Living. If you're not familiar with the IL NET, it's a national training and technical assistance project to strengthen the Independent Living movement by supporting centers and statewide independent living councils. IL NET offers works shops, teleconference, technical assistance, online workshops, training material and other resources on operating CILs and SILCs. Our trainer, Julia Sain is in Charlotte North Carolina and Paul Longmore is in California. Today we have 44 sites representing 23 states and approximately 475 participants. We also have approximately 72 sites that are joining us by webcast. I'd like to thank our site coordinators across the country for your participation and interest and for the preparation for your site participants. We will taping this call and you will receive a copy of that as a part of your registration. So if you don't want to take notes you'll have the audiotapes to refer to later. Please keep in mind that your feedback about this call is very important to us because it helps us do a better job in the future. So if you take just a moment right now to pull out your copy of the a evaluation form that you'll find in your participant materials, it will remind you to fill it out at the end of the call. There are actually two evaluation forms, one is titled teleconference evaluation form which is one we want back here at the NCIL office and the other is titled site coordinator evaluation form which your site coordinator should have given you. The latter form goes to your site coordinator at your location to assist them in knowing how they're doing in meeting your needs on site. So please don't send that one back to NCIL. I want to thank the site coordinators for making copies of the manual for all the participants in your format. You'll find the agenda for today's call on Page I. If you want to turn to that page and site coordinators just a reminder to you that you'll need to point automatic the corresponding page numbers to your participants. I'd like to introduce your speakers, Julia Sain who has been working at programs for accessible living in Charlotte, North Carolina since 1984, and Paul Longmore, professor of history and the director of institute at San Francisco State University. Paul specializes in early American history and the history of people with disability. Without further ado, I would like to turn the call over to Julia. JULIA: Hello to everyone. I would like to say that although I've been working in an Independent Living center since 1984 I've been affiliated with this center since December of 1979. We were one of the first Independent Living centers in the country. And around Christmastime of 1979, the founder of this center hired me because I was a freelance interpreter to interpret the open house and was the first time that I found out what an Independent Living center was all about and the center actually opened its doors January 1st of 1980. So I've been around here for a very long time and feel like almost from the beginning of time. The importance of the history of having been here for so long is the fact that I was able to hear the oral history of the movement from basically the first generation, and what a blessing that is to be in a place where I can hear firsthand what happened to get the movement started. But as we were getting into perhaps the second generation of people working at centers and then perhaps on into the third, I realized that a lot of people were coming to work at Independent Living centers who really did not know about the history, names that I was very familiar with and would throw out to someone, they had never heard of the person, much less what they had done. So in late '96, early '97, I said to the man who had hired me and founded this center, Mr. Chester helms, if he would help me put together the history and in some way prepare it for a training so that it would be there and he and I sat for a lot of time and I wrote down his recollections and some of the other things, brought in some materials that were available, and in March of '97, I presented this workshop for the first time. And on April the 4th of '97, Mr. Helms passed a way and so this is practically first generation oral history, not unlike you might have of your own family and I feel very strongly about it from that perspective. So I'm going to tell you my part of this training is the history piece as far as the start of the Independent Living movement as a movement, the history of the first center for independent living, and then where the money came from, which is always a good thing for us to figure out. If we can figure that out, we can figure out perhaps how to get more of it. And the whole history of our movement as far as specifically Independent Living starts in a town south of (Inaudible) out there where Paul is today in Burlingame. It's the town where Ed Roberts grew up. He was a 14-year-old at the time our story begins who actually had not been particularly interested in his education or academics, but was very interested in athletics. In fact, he would -- during the off season, he would help Billy Martin of the New York Yankees practicing shagging flies and things like that. But in 1953, at the age of 14, he contracted polio, which was a not uncommon thing to have happen at about that time in our country's history. He went on to spend 20 months in hospitals, and when he was released from the hospital, it was to go home and be in an 800-pound iron lung. Now, his mother, Zona Roberts was and is a remarkable woman, and had learned as her -- in her work as a labor organizer in California that anybody can do anything, and one of the comments is that if someone tells you no, when you ask for something and someone tells you no, you have either asked the wrong question or the wrong person. You keep going until you get a yes. And that is the basic philosophy of advocacy in an Independent Living center. You keep asking until you get the right person or the right -- ask the right question. Ed spent a lot of his time in his iron lung actually going to class on the telephone and so forth and whereas before that hadn't been something he relished doing, he now was very excited about education because he realized since she was going to make a difference in this world it was going to be what he could do from the neck up and not so much his physical prowess and so he was able to attend classes on the phone. And his senior year of high school he was able to physically go back on to campus. They had affordable ventilation machines and so forth, and so his senior year he as able to go back and he says he remembers when he got to the campus, and he was getting out of his vehicle and all these people were standing around watching, gawking and staring, and looking back he thought she should have been embarrassed, but it was the same kind of reaction Elvis got when he came home from the Army. So he thought, me, Elvis, we have a lot of in common. He went on to complete his study for his senior year in high school, but they didn't want to let him graduate. You know, because he hadn't completed his driver's Ed requirement and he hadn't completed his physical education requirement. So mom goes to the school board and how high up she had to go, I don't know, but she wound up getting approval for, No. 1, they waived his driver's ed requirement because you can imagine back then someone with Ed's disability was not going to be expected to be able to drive, and so they were able to waive that. And as far as the physical education requirement, she convinced the powers that be that they should give him credit for his fiscal therapy classes saying I challenge anybody from his PE class to come and go through an hour of physical therapy. So they finally said okay, fine. They would let him graduate. And he went through a couple of years at a community college, but that wasn't really what he wanted to do. He really wanted to go to a four year college and get a degree. Some of the colleges at that time had been made accessible because of the returning World War II veterans and the colleges wanted them top be able to finish their education, but there weren't a lot of them. I need you to hold on for a second because we lost our connection with our server. So I need to restart. Hold on just a moment, please. JULIA: All right. Okay, you may proceed. Thank you. JULIA: He didn't want to go to those colleges, he wanted to go to UT Berkeley. He went to vocational rehabilitation asking for assistance in paying for that education. I'm sorry, hold on. (we are experiencing technical difficulties) Okay, let's try it again. JULIA: A little musical interlude is never a bad thing in the middle of the day, is it. The colleges that were considered accessible for the returning veterans were not the places that Ed wanted to go. He wanted to go to U. C. Berkeley. So he went to vocation rehabilitation and asked if they would pay for an education at Berkeley. And the response from his V. R. counselor was, no, because it's not really feasible that you're ever going to work; but that didn't stop him. He went around to the campus and got to meet some of the people and applied there any way. He was accepted based his applications, and when she saw him, they said he couldn't come there. The dean said we've tried crippled people here before but it just didn't work. Well, it could have been because the school wasn't accessible. That didn't stop Ed. He went around for the next year meeting people on the campus, finding routes to get from one place to another, meeting a lot of people who were willing to -- (technical difficulties). So the next year when he applied, the dean said we will let you in because you do have a list of attendance and do know how to get from one place to the other, but there is no dorm room that can accommodate an 800-pound iron lung. He had met the head of the campus, the hospital administrator said it's not ideal but we'll give him a room in the hospital that would accommodate the 800-pound iron lung. So with no other way of saying no, they let him in. And he was truly a pioneer in that. The day that he started at Berkeley, the headline in the paper said, helpless cripple goes to school, but he didn't care. He was there. He was on campus. Berkeley sort of saw that this was doable and they began accepting other people with disabilities, particularly with physical disabilities because they were all living in the hospital. Now, they didn't all have iron lungs, but once you put a person in there in one place you need to stick all of them in there together. In fact, by 1967 there were 12 people in wheelchairs living in the hospital. Students there and they were called -- they called themselves the rolling quads. But imagine Berkeley in the 1960's. And as I go around doing training, I look around the room and it a mazes me how few people working in the Independent Living movement were alive in the '60's, but some of us were. And we know when we hear Berkeley in the '60's, we think of the protests for the Vietnam war, campaigning for the rights of minorities, women's rights and so forth, and Ed said that he spent a lot of time in what we used to call, for all you young kids, we used to call them rap sessions and sitting around talking about things like this and Ed would hear someone who was black say, I cannot get this job because of who I am, because of what I am, and Ed said I can't get that job because of what I am either. And a woman would say I can't get this job because of just my body, and Ed would say, well, I can't get a job because of my body, either. And he began to recognize an affinity with the oppressed minorities in the country and that was when the ideas began to come to him that this is a movement, that this is a group of people that need to be a political force. And so they started doing things on and off campus. One of the things that they heard about a shopping cart that was going to be built in Berkeley, not there on the campus, of course, but in town. And so the 12 people decided that they were going to go to a zoning board meeting. Now, I don't know about where you are now, but I know that in Charlotte, if we took 12 people in wheelchairs to a zoning board meeting, it would -- it would scare the hockey out of everybody. But these guys got there and they said what do you want? And they said, well, you know, if you build it with cut in the curb so we can get in and spend our money, it sure would be better for everybody. And over the course of those discussions, the city pledged $50,000 a year to ramp the city streets, curb cuts. And I will tell you that when Ed passed away and there was a memorial service for him in Washington, senator Tom Harkin from Iowa was there and one of the things he said was, "when other leaders of oppressed minority groups pass away, there are statues and memorials and plaques and we will remember them; but Ed passed away and there aren't statues and there aren't plaques and there aren't memorials, but everybody have every curb cut in the country is its own memorial to Ed Roberts." And I don't know about in your community, but I agree with that, the work that's been done by the people with disabilities that have come before us as advocates makes a huge difference. Well, getting back to what was happening. Berkeley started accepting more and more people and they weren't just people in wheelchairs, we had folks that were deaf and folks that had other disabilities and they were all hanging out in the hospital. And the head of the hospital said, you got to get out of here, you know, you're disrupting our flow, and you need to be having these meetings that you're having someplace else. And so in 1970, Ed asked the campus powers that be if he could have a room, an office, so that the students with disabilities could come. (no audio) JULIA: Had to go around the world to get to your elbow, things like that, and suddenly itbecame so popular and such a great place to learn from one another that people from the city of Berkeley started coming there, and even they weren't students, but they had disabilities and they started coming and hanging out and talking about ways to get through things and how to make a change in the world. And in 1972 the campus people came to Ed and said you got to get this off campus, you're messing up our traffic flow. You've got people here all the time and you need to be out away from where we are. And so he was able to get grants and so forth and in 1972 opened a storefront in Berkeley, and took what they were doing on campus with the physically disabled students program and moved it into the community and he called it -- drum roll, please -- the center for independent living. They were struggling for funds and I love to tell new center board people that even on Friday nights they would have a poker game, and 10 percent of the winnings would go back to the center. I thought this was unique and interesting until I found out that some of our coastal centers actually were able to do something very similar to this today with working on the gambling boats and the casinos and so forth. That's pretty cool. In 1975, the governor of California, Jerry Brown, visited the center for independent living in Berkeley and two things: First of all, decided that he would be an excellent head of the state's division of vocational rehabilitation, you know those people who said he would never work, he was now going to be hiring and firing them. You know, you stick around an independent living long enough, irony can be sweet. The other thing that happened was Jerry Brown was so impressed with what was happening at the center for independent living, particularly the concept of the peer relationships being developed, that he put it in the state budget, and because of that, other centers began to grow in California and up and down the west coast. So I told you about Ed starting the movement and why he started the first center for independent living. So I wonder if now would be a good time for me to take a sip of water and you folks to see if you have any questions specific to that before I get into talking about the Rehabilitation Act. KRISTY: Do we have any questions? OPERATOR: if you have a question at this time, please press 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. The first question comes from the University of Missouri, St. Louis. CALLER: This is Colleen, can you hear me? Colleen and Max, we're both here. JULIA: Are you going to correct me. CALLER: I thought Ed told me that PDFP was founded in '65 and that they were able to they used that as the model for the development of CIL obviously and when Ed graduated, then that's when they -- he had to get out of there and he and John Hessler, you know, found that storefront in Berkeley and founded CIL in '70. That's when Max, didn't you go out there -- in '72 max went out there and met with Ed. We had founded paraquad in '70 -- JULIA: Stop for a moment. Max said I was right about that. Thank you, Max. CALLER: I just thought -- and Ray also told me that -- because he was running the wheelchair repair and then so did Bill Tainter, we had some conversations way back, but I think that's what Ed told me was in '65 that PDFP was formed because of the need for the students to company lab rate and share their ideas and I thought also that Ed met John Hessler and I think Hale Zukos was living in the hospital, too. I can't be sure about that, but those guys all got out of there and went to CIL. They all worked together to form CIL and launch the community wide effort that they learned based on their success in college they could change the world. Thank you, Julia, I just loved what you said. JULIA: Have you and Max thought about doing your own oral history? CALLER: Yes, we have started the disability institute. We left paraquad in October and Bob Funk is running paraquad right now. He's one of the early guys from Berkeley. And we are working on setting up training -- disability studies programs focusing on Independent Living history and we're actually setting up courses to train disabled people to work in centers to be fully trained and get a degree in Independent Living and we have one of our collaborators is sitting here with us and we have an author, Charlie Klegette, he is writing on Independent Living rights history. We're going to do one heck of an oral history here. JULIA: This has been an unsolicited commercial for their institute. Thank you guys. CALLER: Thank you, Julia. KRISTY: Any other questions? OPERATOR: The next question comes from the center for independent living. CALLER: Hi, everyone. This is Jan Garrett and we have a room full of people from CIL. Whoa!!! Anyway, we're still as rowdy as we always were, and I just wanted to clarify, I do think that PDFP actually formally started in 1970 tall though people may have been meeting before then and we also -- I also wanted to make sure that people understand that there were other people besides Ed Roberts that helped found CIL including some women who I don't think were mentioned, Jan McKewen Brown and people with a wide variety of disabilities who helped found the center as well. So I just wanted to make sure that people understand that it was a broad-based coalition of people that helped found the center and were the early pioneers here. JULIA: Great. Thank you. OPERATOR: The next question comes from the disability and resource agency. CALLER: Hi, my question was just did Ed Roberts was never able to live in the dormitory? He always lived in the infirmary? JULIA: Well, that's a really good question for the people from California or maybe Colleen can answer that. CALLER: I was under the assumption that he -- part of the fight was for him to actually live in a regular dormitory and not the infirmary. JULIA: I think they were finally able to get something accessible within the dorms, is that correct? Max? CALLER: Max? KRISTY: They're not on. JULIA: Well, get back to us on that. That's a good question. KRISTY: I actually have a question from someone watching the webcast. It's from Chuck and freedom resource center. Do you think that some centers for independent living have become just on another social service organization and how do those that have become another service organization get back to their roots of advocacy? JULIA: I think Paul is going to speak to that when he takes over in a little bit. If not, reask that at the end because I do have a strong opinion about that. The question about how does one get back to it has to do with getting training and understanding the philosophy. It's all about the philosophy. You will only be as much of an advocacy organization as the philosophy that you follow. And I'm sure that Paul is going to give us a really strong opinion about that. If you sell your philosophy, then you've sold it and you can't get it back. That's how I feel about it. KRISTY: Are there any other questions? OPERATOR: One further question from the University of Missouri St. Louis. CALLER: Hi, it's Colleen again. And I'll just briefly respond to that last question and that is there was -- we got accepted to do a workshop at NCIL a year ago called Don't Sell Your Soul, and it had to do with Independent Living centers losing their soul for just what you said, Julia. If you've got second and third generation folks coming into this who haven't struggled, people who have benefited from the work of the ancestors, if you will, who didn't have as much -- didn't experience as much discrimination as we did and therefore were able to go to school, go to work, ride buses and basically didn't understand what all the fuss was about and get into centers and start working at traditional social service agencies and we have to get back to our roots in order to continue to advocate for the public policy changes that we need. And that's why we started the institute. Can you speak to whether or not Ed ever got to live in a dorm? CALLER: I'm going to ask Zona about that. I don't remember. Paul might know. Paul is out there. PAUL: What was your question? JULIA: Did Ed Roberts ever get to move into a dorm and be integrated with the rest of the campus. PAUL: I'm looking at my research notes and I don't think he did. JULIA: Stay tuned. It's like a soap opera. All right, are we ready for the next segment? The first real piece of civil rights legislation for people with disabilities is something that people actually didn't fight for until it was almost taken away. In fact, nobody really takes blame or credit for the first civil rights law for people with disabilities, blame or credit depending upon which view you take. It was in 19373 when the Rehabilitation Act was passed, the last section, Section 504, of a document that's probably three-quarters of an inch thick was 39 words that wound up getting the Rehab Act vetoed. It stated that no otherwise qualified handicapped individual in the United States shall solely by reason of his handicap be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefit of, or be subject to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. Well, you know, big deal. What does that mean? And it was passed by both houses of Congress and then people started looking a the it. And universities and municipalities and public airports and all kinds of entities that received federal monies got nervous and said do you realize how much this is going to cost us? We can't possibly do this. And put a lot of pressure on the president and at that time president Nixon, and he vetoed the Rehab Act. Well, people with disabilities may not have gone out and fought for 504 to be included in the Rehab Act, but once they found out what they were about to lose, huge protests sprang up across the country. There was a day when -- what was at that time the snowiest day in D. C, people stormed Washington to meet with their Congress people to say we deserve this. If there is going to be tax dollars out there from the federal government, then we deserve inclusion into the programs and services. Judy Human, who we know was very influential in the Clinton administration under the Department of Education, office of special education and rehab services, developed or organized one of the protests. They had planned to take over the federal building in Manhattan, but when they got to the federal building in Manhattan and found that it was way off in the middle of nowhere and nobody really cared that they were out there, they came in to town and they literally laid down in the street and stopped traffic in Manhattan. They only stopped two of the streets because there weren't that many of them, but they were in the street and when the reporters came by and they thought, oh, they must be protesting civil rights, and they must be protesting the war in Vietnam. Of course they were proceed testing the Rehab Act. This wasn't on anybody's radar at that point, but enough congressional folks got the word and actually overturned the presidential veto. So Rehab Act -- Nixon was forced to sign it into law September the 23rd, 1973. Well, that's good news and bad news. The good news it was signed into law, but no piece of legislation is worth anything until it's regulated or appropriated -- and appropriated. Regulated is how are you going to do it, and appropriate is where is the money going to come from? In 1976 we got a new president, Jimmy Carter. He was elected in November and so in January of '77 he took office. Two days after he had put his administration into place, 15 people with disabilities met with the secretary of what was then called health and human services, Joseph Califano, basically to say we would like to help with the regulation piece. We would like to help you write the regulation so that this law that's been signed now for awhile will actually protect our civil rights, protect us. And the administration kind of sounded like they were interested, but there were just endless meetings where the administration said we didn't write the law and we didn't sign the law and we're going to have to review the law and the people with disabilities did what we still do, in good faith, kept going back, meeting with them, but a little bit stronger and a little bit more frustrated every time. Until the people with disabilities gave them an ultimatum. Have the regulations ready by April 4th of 1977 or else. Well, you can just imagine that they weren't quaking in their boots over the or else piece, or else what? What do you 12 people or 15 people going to do? But sure enough, April the 4th, 1977 came around and there were no regulations. And so the group of people -- the system, the network that had been started over the 504 protests back in '73 sort of kicked into gear again and they were able to coordinate sit-ins at federal office buildings in ten cities across the country. Well, until Oklahoma City, I'll have to tell that you the idea of a federal building and the importance of a federal building never really meant much to me; but I can see now looking back on it why that was an ideal place for them to choose. Now, some of those protests lasted a few hours, you know, just until the media showed up and they could get on the twelve o'clock news or whatever, but you people out there in California came through once again, and the protests that took place in San Francisco wound up taking over -- taking on a life of its own. There were people with disabilities -- around 150 total wound up being involved in the process -- and they were able to take over that building for 28 days. And it was phenomenal to imagine their commitment to what it was going to take and just permeating the building. They came in and they took over. One of the things I like about this story is the fact that it was so cross disability because there was every disability represented there. And in fact, it's a good thing because at one point in the story the people in the building cut off the telephones so that one floor couldn't communicate with the next floor so that there was no trying to keep it from being organized. But because there were people who were deaf and they were able to get interpreters that would stand on the street and they would post a person who was deaf at the window. So an idea would spring from the second floor and the person who was deaf would relay it to the interpreter who would relay it to the fourth floor person who was deaf and relay it to the rest of the floor. So being an interpreter, I appreciate the fact that I do have a smidgeon -- my predecessors have a smidgeon of responsibility in this whole movement. But after 28 days, which was the longest takeover of a federal building in U.S. history, the longest sit-in, that's another term from the '60's you youngsters wouldn't know, but the longest sit-in in history was over the fact that the 1973 Rehab Act Section 504 was not regulated. I'll bet if you ask ten people that question or 100 people that question they would not know that. And finally, finally, they won. And the law was regulated. Now, the appropriations did take longer, the appropriations didn't kick in until the later '70's, but the regulations were available. Now, people across the country started banning together to create not for profit boards and centers began to spring up kind of like weeds all over the country, but there were two problems: One was that the terminology was kind of vague. What is advocacy? What is grass roost? What is peer counseling? And you had entities that, well meaning or not, would take the money, call themselves a center for independent living and set up segregated housing or single service. We help people in wheelchairs or only heap people who were blind or whatever, and the other problem was that there was no direct funding to the centers. And the money all went flew the vocational rehabilitation. That was really the only mechanism that our government had forgetting money down to this grassroots kind of thing that they didn't really have their hands around any way. Now, I came along like I said to the center in 1984. And at that time we had a person whose job it was to fill out the state forms in order for us to justify the money that the federal government had already agreed to give us. But it was sitting in the bank account at the state level and the state didn't want to give it -- didn't want to release it. And perhaps justifiably, because they didn't know how much they were going to be held accountable for what this up start group of grassroots advocates came up with, and wanted to make sure that all the I.'s were dotted and all the T.'s were crossed and nobody could connect to them and say how dare you fund these people or give money to these people who are causing problems. But it had to be changed. I remember one time when here we took a federal holiday that the state didn't have and wound up not being able to meet our payroll because the state refused to send us our money in time to meet our payroll because we took a holiday they didn't take. So it was our fault if we didn't get paid on time. In 1982, enough people -- people with disabilities, advocates, center directors, center staff, center board people, people that we would now probably refer to as the dinosaurs of the movement. It was a loving expression, came together and said if we're going to make a difference, it's going to have to be a reauthorization and we're going to have to get Congress to understand that we need to be respected for who we are. We need to have regulations, we need to have rules. We need to have terminology that specifies, we need to form cross disability inclusion and that we need to get the money directly and so forth. So in 1982, the National Council on Independent Living was founded, and was able to, through a lot of advocacy and a lot of grassroots work going back to what we used to be, there was some reauthorizations of the Rehab Act before then, but in 1992 was a huge shift of what was able to happen. It specified terminology so that it told exactly what you were going to be if you were going to be a center for independent living. It set up assurances and standards. Prior to this I can remember that if I had -- if our agency had a consumer and we were doing individual counseling with this individual and this individual was moving to Podunk whatever state. If there was listed an independent living center in that state, I still didn't feel comfortable referring this consumer to that center because I didn't know if it was one of those high rises for people with a single disability. It might not have been what we were, and so we couldn't refer to one another because we really weren't sure who was out there. The feds did an audit of existing centers when these assurances and standards came out to see if the existing centers would be able to continued under the new rule, and a lot of centers got closed. They had been receiving the money because now they were not going to be able to meet. They were going to have to start from scratch because they had veered so far from the philosophy and the history. It increased funding for centers and because that was 12 years ago, I'll tell you that if you go now to the national council independent living convention and so forth, a lot of centers will tell you we started in '92, which is good because there was a lot of money, but there weren't a lot of people trained in the philosophy or prepared to do what is not easy and that is grassroots advocacy. It set up the Independent Living Council, the SILCs and it sent direct funding to the centers. So instead of us having to jump through the hoops and to get the money from the state, we were able to get it directly. I want you to turn, if you will, in your handout, your manual, to the regular print page 63. Just because I want you to see where the Independent Living Centers fit in the grand scheme of things. You've got the office of the Department of Education, the Secretary of Education, underneath that, you have the office of special education and rehabilitation services, lovingly referred to as OSERS. And under that you have the Rehabilitation Services Administration, and under that you have special projects and under that you have Independent Living. And so there is an Independent Living branch of the Rehab Services Administration in each of the ten federal regions. So the people that you answer to as a person at an Independent Living center eventually is your regional R. S. A. person who answers to an OSER person and it goes all the way up to the Secretary of Education. I think that's my spiel. So let's open it for questions. I'm about three minutes over, but I just wanted to, you know, I did get a little bit of a break in there with the music. KRISTY: You're doing great, Julia. JULIA: Does anybody have questions at this point and at the end of this question and answer segment, Paul will begin with the philosophy. OPERATOR: If you have a question at this time, please press 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. There are two questions in queue at this time. The first question comes from the University of Missouri, St. Louis. CALLER: Julia, this is Max. One thing I wanted to mention that not many people know about is that by 1982 when they cut the funds off to the IL centers, the original plan was that all of us were supposed to receive three years of funding. At that point we should be financially stable to not need federal dollars. Well, obviously that wasn't going to happen and not to this day, but a group of us approached the senator from Missouri about this issue. Wondering if we could do something about it and he said, yes, we can. We wanted to introduce an amendment that would require Independent Living centers to receive or to continue funding as long as they meet the criteria laid down by R. S. A. If they were practicing the original plans of Independent Living, the original philosophy of Independent Living. That amendment was passed and the money was re-- was continued with the IL centers, and the first ten centers that were cut off and that money was continuing to flow and to this day that law still stands and that's what enabled the Independent Living centers to receive funding as long as they practiced the IL philosophy. JULIA: And that was 82? CALLER: I think it was about '83. I really wanted to bring up and give credit to senator (Inaudible) who was a strong friend of ours in the movement and really stood up to the plate and did a very, very successful thing for us. CALLER: This is Colleen. I want to add that that was max that went up to talk to talk eagle ton. We were one of the first ten federally funded Independent Living centers in the country. There were about 26 that were funded out in California by the time we actually got any federal funding that came down. There was $200 million that was appropriated for Independent Living in that first go round, and ten centers got it. What did I say? Wishful thinking -- 2 million. And it was divided in tens so each of the first centers got $200,000. And one of the first things we did, Max and Marca and I talked about -- that we needed to form a national organization so that we could make sure that we could continue to -- we weren't allowed to lobby, to educate the Congress about the need for Independent Living, so we called the ten centers to come to St. Louis and have a meeting and decide what we could do to decide what we could do to establish ourselves and sustain ourselves and that's how NCIL was born. The famous hotel story. Which was? There is a lot of stories. We can't tell them all. That's how it happened. Great, thank you. From a couple of dinosaurs in St. Louis. We don't mind being called dinosaurs. KRISTY: Any more questions? OPERATOR: The next question comes from S. M. I. L. E. go ahead with your question, please. CALLER: This is Diana Barbie in Arizona. I'm kind of curious as to how R. S. A. works with other independent living centers? Are you pretty active with R. S. A. or do you pretty much work independently from them? Because we don't have a great deal of cooperation here with the R. S. A. office here in our local area. JULIA: I can speak to the fact that they are sort of different all over the country. That is a movement that we're working on actually to get more consistency and more training -- just as there are a lot of different people working at Independent Living centers, there are a lot of different people working at R. S. A. offices and some have more experience in disability issues, some have more experience in fiscal issues, some have experience more from service provision standpoint, so we're trying -- we're working with R. S. A. in Washington, not on the regional levels, but in Washington, to get some consistency from one region to another. I wouldn't say that we're like hand in glove or anything, but I do know that we get -- if we ask questions of our regional people, they're very good to respond. What they won't do, and one thing that I emphasized, being a center for independent living means that you're under a compliant grant with the federal government, not a performance grant. So if you only do one thing in each category, you're still funded and it's not up to R. S. A. even to decide if that one thing has been effective at performing the activity. It's your Board of Directors and your SILCs that needs to make sure that the Independent Living services are being provided so forth and so on. And so while you might can get frustrated with your R. S. A. people, they're not really supposed to be all up in your business. They're suppose today just make sure that you're complying and that you are not -- you know, and they don't hear from your consumers that they're angry with you. CALLER: Well, that answer my question. JULIA: Okay, good. OPERATOR: There were two questions in queue at this time. The next question comes from the access center. CALLER: Hello. OPERATOR: Go ahead with your question, please. CALLER: I think they put us on hold is why we weren't hearing nothing awhile ago. Can you hear us? JULIA: Yes, we can. CALLER: My question was, I'm a college student. I went to a junior college. I used the disabled student services which was an excellent program. I also went to a university after I graduated from my junior college and they also had a disable student service program which I used and utilized and it was great with me getting my degree. My question is during my whole time there I never heard the pioneering thing that Mr. Ed Roberts did. I had no background on how disable student services was developed and when it became into play at the colleges and I just think that you guys or whoever is at that level needs to like educate the university student services program about the pioneering things that Ed Roberts did and how all that came about because I used the service and never knew where I came from. I just thought it was supposed to be there, like it was just something that was there and I never knew the struggles that took part in order to get it at the university level or the junior college level. JULIA: And that's because people there don't know about it either. And what I would say is one of the things my center is wanting to do is to develop -- and not just develop because we're going to draw from other places -- but to actually put together a curriculum of disability history and go into colleges and high schools and have a special -- or not special, but have a specific day or two where we can focus on disability as a history of the movement. And some of the universities here, some of the high schools here have expressed interest at having us come in and do that in the history classes, and I'm hoping that that's going to develop and that we're going to be able to suggest that as a best practice to other centers for independent living. It's just going to be a matter of doing it, but a lot of people at centers, when I go and do training on history and philosophy, will say we never heard this from anybody. CALLER: Right. JULIA: And I'll say well the people didn't know it. You can't teach what you didn't know. We're getting close to -- we're encroaching on Paul's time. OPERATOR: There are two questions in queue at this time. JULIA: Short answer. OPERATOR: The next question comes from community access center. CALLER: This should be a quick one. We just have a question about -- is there any of the original groups that worked with Ed still living? JULIA: Yes. CALLER: Who are they? JULIA: Actually that's two questions. I can't give you -- I can't give you the names as quickly as Colleen and Max can because they were a lot of the been there done that people. I don't know but what you may be able to get that information off the website somewhere or off a website somewhere. I just can't speak to that. I think there is a video called we won't go away and there is also a book called no pity, and either of those that you can get a hold of will give you a lot more information about both of those events, the takeover in California of the federal office, plus the history of the movement. KRISTY: Thank you. Now I'd like to turn it over to Paul. PAUL: Thanks, Kristy. This is really stimulating. I'm really gratified to be able to be a part of this. In response to the last question, let me just give you a couple of references for anybody who wants to after we're done here do some reading in this area. If you go to the website of the University of California at Berkeley, the Bancroft library, the regional oral history office, they've been doing a project of oral history interviews for a number of years now of the disability rights movement in Berkeley, which they are now expanding to the whole United States. And they have posted on their website some of the oral history interviews they did including Ed Roberts and Zona Roberts and other people who were a part of the early movement in Berkeley. So that's one place you can look. Some of what I'm going to talk about and some of what Julia was talking about I've written about in a book of essays of mine that I published last year that you might find of interest. It includes stuff on the 504 sit-ins of 1977 and on the Independent Living movement. The book is called Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays On Disability. It's published by Temple University Press, and you can get it on the web at A&M a son or one of the other sites or go to Temple University Press site. Anyway, I'm going to edit what I was planning to say because as usual I try to plan too much, but let me start with a statement from a sociologist named Ralph Turner that I think is pertinent to what we're talking about. Turner wrote, "a significant social movement becomes possible when there is a revision of the manner in which a substantial group of people looking at some misfortune see it no longer as a misfortune warranting charitable consideration, but as an injustice which is intolerable in society." Now, that's the nature of the mental transformation, the transformation in perspective that under lines not only the disability rights movement, but all -- not only the Independent Living movement, but all disability rights movements. The Independent Living movement is one contingent of a larger disability rights movement. There are two aspects to what Turner wrote: One, it has to do with that transformation of perception, but the other element that we need to focus on is Turner says that the transformation takes place within a substantial group of peoples. In other words, it's not just individuals alone who undergo this transformation. In fact, that rarely happens that individuals by themselves rethink and come to a different perspective and understanding about a social injustice. Instead, this kind of transformation takes place collectively, and that's what happened at U. C. Berkeley with Ed Roberts and John Hessler and the other guys who were living together in an infirmary in the 1960's and early 1970's. But the transformation of consciousness was not located exclusively in Berkeley. It was also taking place among other people with disabilities in other parts of the country simultaneously. For example, we've got on this call Max and Colleen who already in St. Louis at the same time were thinking through the same types of issues about the segregation and exclusion and marginalization and forced institutionalization of people with disabilities. Meanwhile, in Houston, Texas, another group and also up in Boston, Massachusetts yet another group of people with disabilities were undergoing the same kind of transformation, and they, too, were confronting the same issues. They were addressing the same kinds of problems and independently of one another, these various groups began to form what would emerge finally as an independent living movement across the country. They were starting various kinds of experiments in how to facilitate and support the transition for many people with disabilities from their homes or from institutions to living on their own in their own households in the community. One of the things that the movement began to do, the members of this movement began to do from early on was to formulate ideas, really a coherent ideology of not just Independent Living, but of civil rights for people with disabilities. They drew on various contemporaneous social change movement movements in the United States that shaped the Independent Living movement and the larger disability rights movement. They drew on the civil rights movement of African Americans. They drew on the women's movement. They drew on other disability-related movements, for instance, the deinstitutionalization movements to get people with psychiatric disabilities or cognitive disabilities out of institutions. They drew on the mental health movement with its assertion of the right to refuse treatment and the right to expect quality treatment. They also drew on nondisability-related movements like the consumer movement. For instance, the consumer movement was asserting the rights of consumers to challenge and demand accountability on the part of manufacturers and sellers. That -- those notions were borrowed from the consumer movement and applied to the issues of concern to people of disabilities. And they drew on self-help groups, mutual aid that had emerged in the 1960's that provided an alternative to professionalized human services agencies, movements that offered peer counseling and support and distrusted professional domination. The disability rights movement in general and the Independent Living movement in particular always paralleled other movements that sought to demedicalize various kinds of social problems and social issues. Out of these various movements and out of the experience of people with disabilities themselves, the Independent Living movement as one contingent of the larger disability rights movements began to define distinctive disability rights perspectives on these issues. The most fundamental concept to emerge from the Independent Living movement was a redefinition of the nature of quote-unquote disability and a redefinition of the problems that people with disabilities confront. The assertion was that disability is primarily a social and even a political issue rather than a physiological and medical issue. The assertion was that the limitations in social and vocational functioning experienced by most people with most kinds of disabilities, most of the time, are not the inevitable result of physiological difficulties or inherent physical or mental limitations, rather most of those social limitations result from society alley created factors. Things like for people with physical disabilities, the inaccessibility of the built environment or disincentives in public policies regarding things like employment or marriage. Also domination of people with disabilities by bureaucrats or professionals in various helping professions, and also fundamentally and pervasively for people with all sorts of disabilities they're limited in this view by deeply entrenched social prejudice that expresses itself through not just individual interpersonal acts of discrimination, but more importantly through institutionalized discrimination. Now, given the nature of those disabilities and the problems confronted by people with disabilities, the view was that what needed to be changed -- what needed to be fixed and altered was not people with disabilities themselves, but the larger society. In other words, it's the social built environment that needs to change, and in particular, the Independent Living movement addressed the need for reforms in the rehabilitation and social services system. Now, reframing the problems in these ways led to different kinds of solutions than had been traditionally pursued by medical and vocational rehabilitation professionals. It led to the identification of different objectives and different outcomes. So for example, the rehabilitation system had focused on physical self-sufficiency, that is the capacity of the individual to provide for all of his or her own physical needs. That was premised as the necessary basis for things like employment and social participation. In contrast, the Independent Living movement began to a certain that those things might be useful if they were practical objectives for individuals with specific kinds of disabilities, but other objectives were more important, namely, self-determination, personal control of one's life, personal choice about how one lived one's life, how one got accomplished activities of daily living. So, for example, the movement activists questioned who was more independent? A person who could get dressed by himself or herself alone if two hours or a person who got dressed with assistance from somebody else in 15 minutes? Judith, one of the leaders of the Independent Living movement said to us, independence does not mean doing things physically alone, it means being able to make independent decisions. It is a mind process, not contingent upon a quote-unquote normal body. So self-determination, personal choice became a central tenet of the Independent Living movement. That involved also a rejection of protection from risks as a form of paternalism. It resulted in the demand that people with disabilities of all sorts are entitled to what was called the dignity of risk. In other words, true independence, true humanity involves the possibility of failure, the opportunity to fail was predicated on one's own freedom to choose. That was essential. So a report from the World Institute on Disability, co-written by the way by Hale Zukas -- includes risk taking and making choices about one's own life. Personal independence means having opportunities to make those individual choices based on available and understandable options. Now, in addition to that, the most trans formative notion or concept to come out of the Independent Living and the larger disability rights movement was the assertion that people with disabilities have the right to the means that are necessary for them to participate in the community. This was a direct challenge to traditional civil rights theory as well as traditional notions about rehabilitation and social services. The movement was redefining these sorts of services such as personal assistant services for Independent Living, accessibility and reasonable accommodations. It was redefining them from an old idea that these were charitable benefits offered to people who are fundamentally dependent and the movement was asserting instead that these were simply alternative modes of functioning and that since they were essential for full and equal participation in the community, they needed to be viewed not as matters of charity but as matters of right. Now, this is perhaps the most transformative and radical notion to emerge from the disability rights movement in general and the Independent Living movement in particular and it is still one that causes a great deal of controversy. With that I'm going to pause and ask if there are any questions. KRISTY: Great, thanks, Paul. OPERATOR: if you have a question at this time, please press 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. There are no questions at this time. PAUL: Okay, well then I'll continue. Now, it shouldn't be surprising that in espousing these principles and in pursuing these goals the Independent Living movement often found itself in conflict about medical and rehabilitation professionals. Well, the movement directly confronted that conflict. The movement offered an analysis that views encountered by people with disabilities and professionals in various fields as frequently adversarial, and this analysis viewed the power differential in those relationships as often tilted to the professionals side. In another way the Independent Living movement also raised the critical views of the dominant powers that affect people with disabilities, for example, the Independent Living movement from early on began to criticize manufacturers and vendors and service providers as often serving their own financial and status interests at the expense of the best interests of people with disabilities themselves. That's one reason that from early on because of these conflicting interests and disparities of power that Independent Living centers established advocacy departments, and it's important to note that advocacy departments not only trained individuals with disabilities in personal self-advocacy, but many centers have also developed systems change advocacy training. The other thing that's been mentioned already has to do with the voice and role of people with disabilities in the centers and in the movement. That's been an ongoing struggle. It's often taken place at a political level. Early on, Ed Roberts, soon after the founding of CIL and his colleagues addressed that concern. In a 1985 interview in the Disability Rag, Roberts addressed that issue. He said that the role of the Independent Living centers was to be heavily political as well as service oriented, but in the last year of the Carter administration, because of the attacks from political opponents of disability rights movement, the threats to funding led people to begin to back pedal. In addition to that, Roberts said that in the beginning our philosophy was that all management level jobs would be run by disabled people, people would get the skills they needed at the Independent Living centers and then move out and work at other places, whether it was transit, housing or whatever. We had a vision we could take over the charities and we resented and disliked telethons. We reserved the top jobs for disabled people. The purpose was for them to get skills through these jobs. A lot of programs around the country now say they can't find qualified disabled people. That's a kind of cop out, he said. A really thorough outreach can find people who are experienced. Now, the point I want to make about this, is that on the one hand the aim of the Independent Living movement was to empower individuals with disabilities to make self-determined choices about their own personal lives always from the beginning simultaneously. The Independent Living and disability rights movement have aimed that collective self-determination on the part of communities of people with disabilities. That's why the emphasis on people with disabilities getting training to exercise leadership. That's why a strong emphasis is on participation of all levels of people with disabilities in all organizations that impinge on their lives. Well, at that point I'll pause again and see if there are any questions. OPERATOR: You have a question at this time, please press 0, 1 on your telephone key pad. The first question comes from the University of Missouri, St. Louis. CALLER: Hey, we're having fun out here. PAUL: Hey Colleen and Max. CALLER: You brought did issue of some intimidation from the federal government about advocacy work within the I. L. centers. Remember that happening in the early '80's when President Reagan sent out a letter to all of us, telling us with very intimidating verbiage about using federal dollars to lobby against any federal programs. And that was so intimidating and frightening to so many of the centers, mainly because of our own naive tay, that we started to back , a lot of centers backed off on the advocacy issues and switched more to direct services. PAUL: That's what Ed was talking about from that interview in the Rag. CALLER: It took a long time I think to get over that and a whole different political atmosphere for needing more support for what we wanted to do. I'm afraid today we still see effects from it. PAUL: One of the things that happened in the '80's was that for a time political advocacy moved out of the centers into other kinds of organizations. I think there has been some renewal of that advocacy based in some centers, but as you say, there is still a lot of hesitancy on the part of some centers. CALLER: As we get bigger -- the centers get bigger and they need more sources of funding and a lot of that funding is based on the idea of service driven, that it's more service driven and advocacy sort of takes a back seat. PAUL: One of the other things that I think historically has happened around centers and other kinds of organizations is that local communities of people with disabilities have company a leed, have come into existence around the centers. What seems to be the case -- there is historically for instance with residential schools or even special education schools and classes for people with physical disabilities or blind people or deaf people that friendships, social networks formed within those institutions and people wanted to maintain their friendships subsequently, so they formed social clubs and social organizations after they left school and eventually as a result of those social contacts those groups evolved into political advocacy organizations. I think something similar has happened with, for instance, disabled student services on some college and university campuses, and Independent Living centers in some locale its and people come to those places because they need services, but they end up connecting with other people with disabilities and communities form and those communities end up serving not just an interpersonal or social function, but becoming the means for even stronger collective political activism. JULIA: Could I interject here Paul. When it comes to philosophy, one of the things I say to everybody I hire here is that the goal of an Independent Living center is to be unnecessary. If you -- if the whole world is accessible and everybody with a disability is their own advocate, I am not needed. If you go into an Independent Living center, if you go into administering an Independent Living center with that theory, it will help you make decisions about accepting funding sources. If I set up a system, a program, that people will depend on for the rest of their lives, I cannot ever become unnecessary, and that is not my job. PAUL: Let me take a somewhat different perspective on that. There are -- whether or not it's an Independent Living center or some other sort of institution or facility, there are many people with disabilities who have two needs that will be ongoing, one is a need for various kinds of support services that can only be found through some sort of agency. The second is a need for community. Now, whether they find that through an Independent Living center or someplace else is beside the point. The need is there. The need for connection with a community of one's peers where one can share experiences and also engage in collective action on behalf of the interests of the whole group and not only the individuals involved. Now, these two needs may not necessarily be met by an Independent Living center, but they're going to have to be met somewhere and one of the problems for a great many people with disabilities in our society is that they live isolated from one another, disconnected from one another, and part of the deeply entrenched social prejudice that we confront is that a lot of us get the message if you want to be regarded as socially valid, if you want to be perceived as a legitimate person, the last thing you ought to do is hangout with or be identified with other people with disabilities. Some of the most accomplished and successful people I know with disabilities have lived very isolated, lonely, disconnected lives because they've never had the opportunity or they never felt comfortable with connecting with other people with disabilities. And I think one of the functions that we can serve through agencies like ILC's is to provide legitimate of that identification with other people with disabilities and facilitate ways for people to become part of disability communities. KRISTY: I'm going to let you go ahead and go on, Paul, because we're running short of time, unfortunately. PAUL: Okay. Well, let me -- there was I believe -- Kristy before we started, we talked about a question that had come in by E-mail, and that had to do with the need of centers to address a kind of hierarchy of disability. That is people with certain kinds of disabilities at many centers seem to get more attention than others. There is the notion that people with some kinds of disabilities, say, particularly physical disabilities, are viewed as more legitimate, more authentic as people with disabilities than others -- with other kinds of disabilities, particularly people with not a parent or hidden disabilities, often feel that they are viewed as less legitimately or authentically a part of the disability movement or community or centers. A number of years ago I did a workshop at a center in California on the history of the disability rights movement and that issue came up. One person there with a nonapparent disability leveled that kind of complaint about the relative attention to or neglect of people with various kinds of disabilities. What struck me was that a generation ago no one would have raised that kind of issue. The historical reality is that disability-based movements have typically been organized around disability specific constituencies, there is the organized blind movement and the deaf community and the movement of and for people with learning disabilities, the movement of and for people with developmental disabilities, psychiatric survivors, people with physical disabilities. We've often been historically separate, but there have been movements as Julia was pointing out and talking about the 504 sit-ins of 1977 in which cross disability alliances formed. That's true again in the lobbying for the ADA and oftentimes these movements or groups have remained separate from one another and more problematically in competition with one another. So it was in one way I thought extraordinary when this person at this center leveled this complaint. What I think it reflected was the emergence of a new kind of consciousness as Julia was referring to it, a cross disability consciousness and identity. That first emerged in the 1970's around the 504 issue and it has persisted since then and it increasingly has been a way in which independent living centers around the country have tried to broaden the constituencies they serve so that we're no longer focused on a narrow range of people with certain kinds of disabilities, but much more broadly. This cross disability identification and identity is a significant historical development. Historically, I don't think there was any necessary or inevitable reason why people with various disabilities would identify with or connect with one another, but what has emerged is a disability minority group consciousness over the last generation that says whatever the varieties of functional issues each of us or groups of us confront, there are also larger, broader, in fact pervasive and common issues that all of us together confront as people with disabilities. Namely, the pervasiveness and depth of social prejudice and institutionalized discrimination. The conclusion of that is that we need to work together, that we need to identify what we share in common. We need to understand our differences, and respect them, but we need to come together and act collectively on behalf of all of us. And it also suggests the emergence of a cross disability community that serves a deeper and more significant function than just a political function; but a function of affirming a common as well as a varied disability identity, and Kristy, I'll stop there. KRISTY: Sounds great. What I'd like to do now is to open it up for question and answers to both Julia and Paul if there are any. OPERATOR: if you have a question at this time, please press 0, 12 on your telephone key pad. There are four questions in queue at this time. The first question comes from access living. CALLER: Hi, my name is (Inaudible) and I'm from assisted living in Chicago. KRISTY: if you could turn down your (Inaudible) that would be great. CALLER: Hello. Yes, we are from access living in Chicago. I have a comment apropos of the proceeding comments made bid the speaker. One of the things that I have noticed is that our movement has become particularly self-conscious. When you spoke of the fact that some of us, particularly those of us who have hidden disabilities, feel that less than legitimate when we are perhaps with other people with disabilities. I guess to some extent I must agree with you. However, there is a problem in -- I'm thinking -- that assessment. One of the problems I think has to do with the fact that all minorities in this country seem to be in a competitive game for money; whether that money comes in the form of affirmative action dollars, whether it comes in the form of funding for programs such as ours and CILs. We are all trying to get money so that we can keep ourselves alive, in school, working, what have you. So it seems that some of us, whether we have darker skin or whether we have redder skin or whether our eyes are more almond shaped or whether we have access or lack of access to our legs or we cannot hear or we cannot see or perhaps we have a chemical imbalance in our brain, what we need to do is we sort of have to have some sort of burden of persuasion upon the courts, the legislature and all sorts of policy making groups in order to convince them that we are entitled to that money. And it just seems to me that that, again, has bred this sort very self-consciousness that I'm entitled to this. I have to have this. And of course, you know, if we're going to be the sort of people that say that we don't want pity, that we don't want to be looked down upon or looked any differently than others, we also must strive extremely hard not to be that self-conscious. We must try to strive for as much integration and as much inclusionary language in our own movement as well. Because otherwise we are going to, I think, start degenerating into some sort of movement -- not only in the disability movement, but all minorities are going to be degenerating into some sort of, you know, (Inaudible). We want more money. When in reality what we need to do is we need to get jobs. It's a bad economy out there. And it's just as common people that we need to get access to those jobs, not because we're disabled. It's not because of the color of our skin. It's that we are entitled as citizens of this country to jobs. We are entitled to housing, to health care, and to all of those things. And if we don't start looking at it in that way, as a matter of class, as a matter of the fact that people -- our people, I think we're going to be in real big trouble. KRISTY: I hate to cut you off but I want to be able to get other questions in if possible. Does somebody want to answer that? PAUL: I appreciate the comment. I mean you've touched on a lot of important things, one of the problems not only for disability movement but for Austin pointed out other communities is that it is a situational scars it, groups are pitted against one another, when what they need to do is form an alliance and work together. In addition to that, within the disability movement itself, it think it's incumbent upon all of us to try to understand the varieties of disability experiences and not assume that disabilities are homogeneous or unitary experience. And thirdly, a point that I neglected before that I'm glad you brought up, unfortunately, tragically, unjustly, the disability rights movement and particularly the Independent Living movement has tended to be overwhelmingly a white, middle class movement and needs to diversify. So I'll stop there. KRISTY: I think we have time for just one more question. OPERATOR: the final question comes from an ILC. CALLER: My name is David. I think that when we speak about worrying about being advocates because of what's going on with the federal government, it's totally ridiculous. The advocacy is part of what we do. If we can't be advocates and change the system, then we're just medical morale fixing people one at a time. KRISTY: if we don't advocate who is going to -- there are a lot of service providers out there, but who else is doing advocacy? KRISTY: Unfortunately that's all the time we have for today. Thank you for the excellent questions you raised. Please complete the evaluations that were included in your information packet and return them to us at the NCIL office so we may continue to provide you with the high quality training activities. I'd like to personally thank Julia Sain and Paul Longmore for their time and efforts to make this teleconference a success. Thank you all and goodbye for now. Paul and Julia, please stay on the line.