Independent Living News & Policy from the National Council on Independent Living
You are invited to join AmeriCorps on Wednesday, October 21 at 1:00 p.m. Eastern to learn how AmeriCorps grants can support initiatives that engage and impact the disability community. The Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is available online and the applications are due January 20, 2016. AmeriCorps encourage all interested organizations to join this call.
Register online. For reasonable accommodations please email [email protected].
Required pre-call reading:
Source: White House Conference on Aging, by Nora Super
Last week, I attended a learning exchange on aging in place sponsored by Habitat for Humanity International and AARP Foundation. The demographic shift toward a larger older population and recognition that most older individuals prefer to stay in their homes and communities as they age has led the venerable Habitat for Humanity to re-examine its practice of building new homes. Homes left empty due to foreclosure and homes occupied by elderly residents often need significant repairs and updates to make them more accessible and safe. AARP Foundation has sponsored several of these learning exchanges across the country to bring together Habitat affiliates and experts in aging in place to discuss ways to advance common goals. It’s these kind of community-based solutions that continually inspire me as we work on ways to improve the lives of older Americans and their families.
Home modifications can make our homes more livable, safe, and comfortable for those of all ages and abilities. As part of the White House Conference on Aging, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released a 2-page guide detailing some simple modifications, which are relatively, low-cost, do-it-yourself changes, as well as more complex modifications, which may require professional or skilled volunteer assistance. Home Depot also released a tip sheet and “how to” video highlighting simple home modifications to help individuals age in place. These home modifications can benefit individuals in many ways including:
Kudos to these wonderful partners for exploring and acting on how they can help individuals age in place. Let’s all do our part by making some modifications that can help to safeguard the health and well-being of older individuals and people with disabilities.
Greetings from the NCIL Aging & Disability Resource Center (ADRC) Subcommittee! We have been busy spreading the word about NCIL’s ADRC principles. Several Subcommittee members presented on IL values at the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems conference in Dallas in the spring. Ericka Reil of Vermont CIL and Mary Margaret Moore of the Independent Living Center of the North Shore and Cape Ann, Inc. in Massachusetts were received well and the IL principles were new to many in attendance at our workshop. At the NCIL Conference, our ADRC workshop with the Administration for Community Living (ACL) was given to a packed room, with NCIL members from California, Connecticut, Vermont, and Massachusetts presenting with Joseph Lugo and Elizabeth Leef from ACL. Of particular note were the next steps that ACL is taking with the No Wrong Door model and the upcoming national web-based training for all providing Options Counseling from the ADRCs. Our NCIL ADRC Subcommittee has given much input to ACL for the past two years on the content of this training.
Some of our Subcommittee members were able to attend the Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) conference in late August/early September. A workshop was approved by the Subcommittee and presented by Lindsay Baran, Mary Margaret Moore, and Melanie Hogan on Disability and Aging Perspectives on the No Wrong Door Systems. This caused quite a stir in some of the audience members, but we continue to emphasize that IL values mean walking with, not prescribing a solution, and that for IL, person-centered means person-driven, with dignity of risk, and the opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
As noted above, the ACL web-based training is being rolled out in seven of the 8 Part A grant states, for Options Counselors first. The online training is slated to be started in January, with train-the-trainer access in those 7 states happening now. Despite all of our input, there is still not closure on the accessibility of the online training as developed by the contractor. Of concern, one state has communicated that the online trainings may not work with assistive technology, and accessing the closed captioning elements is a struggle. In addition, there is a mandatory in-person element to the training, so each state has to be trained to what is needed for accommodations for persons with disabilities. ACL has been informed of our concerns by one state, and is addressing this issue with the developer. We will keep the NCIL membership updated as the situation develops. As with all new trainings and initiatives, it is imperative that CILs be involved to not only advise for reasonable accommodations but also to fight for inclusiveness.
Please stay involved with your ADRCs and join our NCIL ADRC Subcommittee, which meets the first Wednesday of each month at 3:00 p.m. Eastern via teleconference. Let NCIL staff Lindsay Baran know if you want to join us by contacting her at [email protected].
CIL-NET Presents… A National Teleconference & Webinar:
September 30, 2015; 3:00 – 4:30 p.m. Eastern
Register online or by using the printable registration form (PDF).
Strong, comprehensive internal controls are a critical piece of sound financial management at successful CILs. Whether you are an experienced Accountant that is new to the non-profit world or an experienced CIL staffer that is new to accounting, this training will provide the overview of nonprofit internal controls that every CIL needs. You’ll also learn what your organization needs to do to meet the requirement to have written procedures for controls over federal awards by the end of the calendar year. Our presenters have decades of experience developing and advising on internal controls and regulations from both within and outside of Centers for Independent Living. Join us September 30th to learn why internal controls are so important and exactly what your CIL needs to have in place to be successful, compliant, and sustainable.
Registration Fee: $75.00. Fee is per site (connection) and does not apply per participant; registrants are encouraged to gather as many individuals as desired to participate by telephone or webcast.
Target Audience:
SILC and CIL executive directors, financial and program managers, and other staff interested in Uniform Grant Guidance, specifically Internal Controls for nonprofit organizations receiving federal awards.
This introductory CIL financial management course is intended for CIL executive directors, managers, fiscal staff, and board members new to nonprofits or accounting. It may also be useful to more experienced personnel who want a refresher.
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this webinar, participants will be able to:
Meet Your Presenters
John Heveron is President of Heveron & Heveron CPAs. He has been serving non-profit organizations, including centers for independent living, small businesses and individuals since 1969 with design of financial reporting systems, entity planning, planning and reviewing audits, compliance audits and other audit services and assistance with indirect cost rates, as well as assisting with strategic planning. John keeps his technical skills sharp through writing and teaching. He has authored a CPA conference manual on Mastering the Nonprofit Environment – Accounting, Auditing and Taxation – for 19 years. He also authors Not For-Profit Alert, a quarterly newsletter with current information for nonprofits. John also presents seminars on non-profit issues for Independent Living Research Utilization, the National Council on Independent Living, the Foundation for Accounting Education, United Way of Greater Rochester, and many others.
Paula McElwee is the Technical Assistance Coordinator for the IL-NET project at ILRU. She previously served on the board of Resources for Independence of the Central Valley and served as interim executive director for four CILs in California, assisting the boards to transition to their next executive director. Paula has consulted with the California state association, California Foundation for Centers for Independent Living, and numerous centers throughout the state.
Paula was the Director of LINK, Inc. in Kansas in 1979, one of the first 10 centers funded through the Rehabilitation Act. She worked in the disability field in Kansas for 25 years, and was appointed by two governors to serve three terms on the Statewide Independent Living Council of Kansas.
Presented by CIL-NET and SILC-NET: A program of the IL-NET national training and technical assistance project for Centers for Independent Living (CIL-NET) and Statewide Independent Living Councils (SILC-NET). The IL-NET is operated by ILRU, Independent Living Research Utilization, in partnership with the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL) and the Association of Programs for Rural Independent Living (APRIL).
Keri Gray of Longview, Texas has been selected to serve as the 2015-2016 Youth Transitions Fellow at the National Council on Independent Living (NCIL), the longest-running national cross-disability, grassroots organization run by and for people with disabilities. Sponsored by The HSC Foundation, the Youth Transitions Fellowship provides a young person with a disability an opportunity to gain professional experience in a position designed to improve coalitions and youth-based programs. The HSC Foundation partnered with NCIL to fund the fellowship as part of its mission to help young people find self-directed paths to adulthood and employment.
As the Youth Transitions Fellow, Gray will facilitate collaboration among internship, fellowship and apprenticeship programs for people with disabilities in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. She will also support projects that benefit young people by partnering with the Youth Transitions Collaborative, the Greater Washington Internship Coalition, NCIL’s Youth Caucus, and youth transition coordinators from Centers for Independent Living across the country.
Gray is a graduate from Abilene Christian University, where she received bachelor degrees in Political Science and Communication, and then a master’s degree in Communication. At the completion of her graduate program she wrote a thesis entitled “The diversity rhetoric of Offices of Diversities: Through the lens of intersectionality.” Her work over the years has centered on the idea that if we study our intersections and how we may intersect with other people, then we can either gain a better understanding of our experiences or even re-construct pathways for our future experiences. She has applied these concepts by leading various student organizations, interning at Leader Pelosi’s office through the American Association of People with Disabilities internship program, creating an internship program at her Alma Mater’s Office of Multicultural Enrichment, and creating a young professionals association in her college town.
By Ted Jackson
A group of us have come together to form the new NCIL Queer Caucus and I’m thrilled to be supporting this group of activists as chair of the new NCIL Queer Caucus. Our hope is that this caucus will bring together gender and/or sexual minorities in the disability community to explore our intersections, commonalities and develop a unified voice for change.
Throughout history we have seen the LGBTQ and disability communities on similar paths: it was the classification of queer folks as mentally ill that allowed authorities to raid the Stonewall Inn which led to riots; as Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann were navigating government systems for access in the 1970’s, Harvey Milk was also in the San Francisco Bay Area defending access to employment for gay and lesbian teachers from an attack at the ballot box; the recent marriage equality victories demonstrate how we may win the same equality for people with disabilities on social security who seek to marry and not lose their benefits; and today we must recognize the sad truth that transgender identity is still listed as a mental health disability.
The NCIL Queer Caucus will be an opportunity for folks to discuss the important issues and intersections and hear from respected speakers. Then bring these focal points back to their other NCIL committees to advocate for inclusive policy. We’ll be meeting on the first Wednesday of each month at 1:00 p.m. eastern time – everyone is encouraged to join us!
A little about me: I’m the Community Organizing Director at California Foundation for Independent Living Centers. At CFILC I organize the statewide Disability Organizing Network (DOnetwork), which supports community led campaigns for access where people with disabilities live, work, learn, shop, play and vote! Before coming to work at CFILC I was an LGBTQ activists and political campaign operative. Over the years I worked on marriage equality campaigns, lobbying against school bullying and advocating for inclusive school curriculum. In 2004 I was the field director for the successful campaign to repeal article XII, the only LGBTQ victory nationwide in the year the community was attacked the most. I draw my plan for disability equality from my past experiences, which I call the “3 E’s: Education, Employment and Elections.” I believe these three areas together hold the key to increasing independence.
Source: Arizona Bridge to Independent Living (ABIL)
ABIL recently updated our policy and procedure for accommodating individuals with Environmental Sensitivities with the help of national experts on the topic and we wanted to share it with other CILs. It isn’t perfect. It is one example of what one CIL has done. We realize this is a difficult topic to address because everyone is different and because our environments are contaminated with a barrage of manmade chemicals and Y-FY/radio waves that are difficult to avoid. Still, it is our responsibility and desire to have our programs and facilities as accessible as possible for our employees and the consumers we serve who experience environmental illness.
We are also including a link to our Suggestions for Transition to a Fragrance-Free Life tip sheet, which we share with new employees during their initial orientation process. The NCIL Environmental Barriers Task Force created NCIL’s Environmental Health Barriers Toolkit, which can be found in the “Resources for Advocates” area of the NCIL website.
Karen Eber Davis
You might believe that asking board members to give a cash gift to your organization is too much. After all, your members do so much for you. They promote you. They give oodles of time. They willingly offer expertise. Asking board members, who do so much, to also give a cash gift is too much right?
Unfortunately, this belief might hurt your organization. Most nonprofits need the cash. They need the donors, who will give, if the board gives. And, your board’s decisions may be impacted. People decide differently when their money is involved.
Let’s look at what’s also happening here. You and your board designed a system that benefits you both. You don’t have to ask them for money, feel guilty about asking for it, or risk irritating them. Your board gets to keep their cash.
Your board already has a standard about giving money. To help your nonprofit, make it your goal to replace the existing standard about optional giving with one where every board member makes a yearly cash gift. This article shares several tools that ingenious nonprofits leaders, like you, can use to create this standard. [Read more…]
Affirming the Importance to People with Disabilities of Access to Services, Real Choices, and Self-Determination
September is suicide prevention month, and during its observance, we, the undersigned, express our sincere sorrow that any human ever experiences a level of despair or hopelessness that results in a choice to end one’s own life.
The concern of the disability, military and veterans, and aging communities in suicide prevention is understandable in view of research regarding rates and reasons, which consistently show these groups at increased risk. According to several studies, the biggest difference between notes of those who died as a result of suicide attempts and those who attempted it but survived was a far greater emphasis in the notes of those who died as a result of their attempts on the belief that they were a burden on other people and society at large.[1] Research also shows that isolation or removal of a person from his or her social group creates increased risk for suicide, and that people experiencing depression – a psychiatric disability – are at a 25 times greater risk for suicide than the general population.[2]
As a community of greater than 56 million Americans with disabilities — including veterans with disabilities and the aging community with acquired disabilities – we have a long history of receiving messages from society that we are a burden on account of our health care needs; our difficulty transitioning back into society; or faulty assumptions about the quality of our lives. Far from harmless opinion, these views – often tantamount to “better dead than disabled” – are an insidious threat to our civil rights and to decisions about allocations of public funds.
As long as the majority of Americans with disabilities continue to live in poverty and unnecessary isolation, without access to appropriate mental health care and comprehensive, fully-funded and operational systems of assistive living services, our alarming and distressing rates of suicide, including assisted suicide, will go unchecked. We find this unacceptable, and in recognition of the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), we echo the words of the National Council on Disability, an independent federal agency, when it wrote, “Society should not be ready to give up on the lives of its citizens with disabilities until it has made real and persistent efforts to give these citizens a fair and equal chance to achieve a meaningful life.”[3]
Underpinning and enshrined within major American disability civil rights laws is the belief that “disability is a natural part of the human experience.”[4] The immutability of disability – like race or gender – forms the basis of the protections these laws confer. And yet, laws alone, absent abiding commitments from all quarters of society, cannot create the type of societal change that together we are fighting to achieve.
We, the undersigned, on this occasion of observing Suicide Prevention Month:
We encourage leaders from across the country to join us in calling out and rejecting policies and practices that exclude, isolate, and discriminate against people with disabilities that so often encourage self-inflicted or assisted premature deaths; and instead to work together toward the full participation and self-determination of all people with disabilities as equally-valued members of our beautiful and diverse human family. [Read more…]
Let’s talk about how to get people with disabilities energized to vote, and how to have an impact on elections! A year out from the next presidential election, how can we plan to organize our communities, educate people about voting, and increase voter turnout among people with disabilities? Join us to learn from experienced organizers in the disability community and from organizers in other movements!
Speakers:
Thank you to the National Disability Leadership Alliance for sponsoring the captioning of this call. If you need additional accommodations to participate in the call, please let us know as soon as possible. [Read more…]
