Yes, this is certainly right on but the ILC movement evolved into a consumer movement. Believe me, all ILCs refer to their disabled clients as consumers. They rely on grants, state money and are very much entrenched in service delivery. Some of them even charge a co-payment for services. There may be a few that are still radical but for the most part they are a product the consumer movement. Berkeley sets itself apart in many ways because there is more political consciousness there, but it is not, BY FAR, representative of what has happened across the nation. The nondisabled professionals moved in to get good stable jobs with the ILCs, they became oriented towards services, not much advocacy and worse, became mini social service units.
Marta
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I want to revisit this problem again, because there are several parts to the history of community based social programs that arose from the war on poverty projects that are important to recall. This history is particularly important for understanding how to start with social reform and civil rights and end up in the squalid world of consumerism and neoliberal privatization schemes. We really did start from the one world and worked ourselves systematically into the other. It is a kind of historical irony, that suits the title, Rake's Progress. Read the synopsis of The Rake's Progress adapted by Igor Stravinsky for an opera: http://www.metopera.org/synopses/rake.html. It helps to develop the mytho-poetic dimensions of this story.
Background.
In the Office of Education, Trio Programs, the original project guidelines made it clear that every effort should be made to enlist, hire and retain for program staff, from within the same population as those served by the programs, and that priority would be given to proposals that demonstrated evidence of satisfying this guideline. These guidelines date from the original Education Acts of 1964 that started these programs, and long before the various pieces of affirmative action policies were implemented.
The underlying social policy position was that educational, social, and welfare services which comprised part of the welfare state had been originally staffed and administered through the traditional federal civil service. These were top down organizations that delivered services to populations and communities from highly centralized, hierarchical and professionalized bureaucracies. This traditional system was completely isolated from the communities served and there were no means available to modify this system from the bottom. Attempting to change the social policy of the welfare state at the local level was as effective as trying to change postal regulations from the local post office, or arguing for tax reform with an IRS agent.
During the Sixties the newer programs enacted under Johnson's War on Poverty, became the focus of changing both the top-down hierarchical organization and the absurd professionalization of the social service delivery system. It was argued strongly by civil rights groups that any form of social service and federal assistance in education, health, and welfare could only be an effective tool in combating the effects of poverty and discrimination, if the means of delivering those services were in the hands of the people directly effected by the conditions that were to be overcome.
The means to achieving those ends required a deep change in the design of the social service delivery system which amounted to recruiting, hiring, training, and retaining people from the communities and populations served. This is how black, hispanic, asian, native american, and disabled people, all termed disadvantaged, ended up as federal program officers, project directors, and came to fill the staff positions of individual programs delivering support services to communities around the country in health, education and welfare, as well as in housing, community development, city planning, and a broad range of legal and advocacy services.
It is easy to trivialize these ideas now days, by deriding them as politically correct. But in the decade before affirmative action legislation even existed, these were quite radical policies. They very effectively put political support for social reform, and the money to accomplish it, behind the rhetorical calls for all power to the people. And, additionally, these programs provided the economic means to rise at least some members of their communities into the mainstream of middle class life.
Implementing this general social policy framework and extending it into state, county, and local government administration particularly at the service delivery level, was the concrete goal of these programs.
So this was the general social policy background for the formation of the Berkeley CIL when it was put together in 1972. Every one involved in the original proposal and planning process as a principle was disabled. The few non-disabled involved played either much less significant working roles, or acted as academic consultants from UCB departments in City Planning, Social Welfare, Public Health, Architecture, and Law. These included both professors and mainly disabled graduate students.
The Problem.
It was not at all obvious how to implement a social service community based project build directly from the disabled community to be served. Many of the kinds of services needed did not exist in any form that was either useful or particularly relevant to the community to be served.
For example there was no accessible public transportation, most common sidewalks, intersections, and doorways were physically non-negotiable from a wheelchair and most power wheelchairs were incapable of traveling outdoors for any distance in any case. There was no method of finding an attendant for personal care, except ads in the newspaper and notes on public bulletin boards. Many disabled people living in the community had no idea that phone company would modify their phones and most telephone company service personnel know nothing about this option. Hand controls for cars and vans existed but only two shops in the entire region did this work. One was about forty miles north of the Oakland-Berkeley area, in Vallejo, and the other was close to fifty miles south in San Jose. It was not physically possible to get into most of the existing county, state or federal office buildings that housed the social welfare, educational, and rehabilitation services of the area. Public schools were not accessible and neither was city hall, the city council, or the board of education, not mention the main post office, municipal or superior courts, YMCA, or any of the other of the common downtown facilities for conducting a public everyday life. Even the jails were inaccessible. Any physically disabled person arrested and charged with a serious crime was held in the Highland Hospital lock up floor. If they were convicted, they were transported out to Vacaville, the nearest state prison medical facility for the criminally insane, some sixty miles east.
The scope of what was not available was enormous and it was not at all apparent, how any of that could be changed by the very people who were trapped in these conditions. And yet, that is exactly what CIL and its numerous projects did.
It is either revisionist history or romantic illusion to imagine that these accomplishments were carried out by professional miracle workers under some magic progressive spell. The fact was these projects were completely and thoroughly rationalized through a long series of political and social processes that amounted to taking the arguments for change into a design to accomplish that change and then advocating for its implementation; and then seeing to it that the long sequence of federal, state and local government agencies were changed accordingly. While there were demonstrations and protests through out the decade of the Seventies, most of these were planned, and were intended to reach a large audience through the media, in order to finalize some part of one project or another. For the most part these were successful.
However, most of the time, the work involved the completely undramatic business of city council meetings, conferences with the staff in the city the managers office, and detailed reviews of such exciting material as current city construction projects, building code modifications, and developing personal contacts with local officials. These official working partnerships were extended to include the state assemblyman's local staff, as well as the staffs of the US House Representative of the district and the US Senate.
A fair amount of the existing regulations, monies, and procedures that constituted the welfare state could be adapted to meet the needs of the disabled community, and it was just of matter of figuring out how exactly that could be done. When serious road blocks developed, then these occasioned political protests and demonstrations. Money to fund particular services that did not exist in any other adaptable form, was usually available from either the federal, state, or local level through demonstration grants.
The Collapse.
The peculiarity of much federal, state, and local government funding was its designation as demonstration grants. There were very few or no funds available for on-going services, as these were often, theoretically already funded as part of existing social services. This distinctive lack of sustained funding for innovative and on-going services ultimately became, the Achilles heel of almost all CIL projects in services. Needs don't change, so once a demonstration grant cycle was complete, the need for service was still there, but the money wasn't.
It was the stated intent of the various funding agencies that these demonstration projects were to be taken over by the appropriate local government or social service agency, once the design and methods were established and proven to work. Of course this final goal was rarely if ever attained. Some demonstration grants did succeed. For example the various proposals to design and develop useful architectural standards for various accessibility projects in the city infrastructure were adopted as local codes. The city government did set-up an internal system to modify the existing public infrastructure, as well as the city offices and facilities to conform to these standards---before the nationally adopted versions became part of the uniform building codes of the country. Various programmatic changes to the operation of local public offices and services were moderately successful.
However, several basic services were never absorbed into the on-going social service agencies: attendant training and referral, wheelchair repair, accessible and affordable housing, accessible and well adapted recreation, and several other public services all remained chronic problems and most are still with us.
The most serious road block at this point, was public transportation which was the focus of the East Bay Terminal strike, that shutdown trans-bay bay buses from San Francisco in the middle of rush hour. Another problem was extending these programmatic and physical accessibility issues through out the state and federal system of government, and the executive branch stalling under Nixon, Ford, and then Carter to implement these changes into law and hence this was the occasion of the 504 demonstrations.
Much deeper and more systemic problems and barriers became intractable. Employment, housing, and sufficient money to live on either on welfare or even with a job was certainly top on the list. The fundamental economics of the entire system proved to be both the first and last barrier that was never to be overcome.
In a sense the disabled community had arrived to join the mainstream of other disadvantaged groups, in a grim parity of parial social exclusion and almost total economic oppression.
Those disabled people who were from families and backgrounds that were economically and socially privileged, succeeded through the changes and successes laid down by the reform movements to carry their privileges into mainstream education, and join their economic peers in professional and business careers, although at reduced rates (in both numbers and money). Meanwhile, those who were not from privileged backgrounds rarely succeeded in making the economic and social gains that might otherwise have been theirs, if they had not been disabled. The same divisions between have and have not seen developing in this period were mirror and magnified in the disabled community.
Fundamental material progress in the disabled community basically came to a halt during the Reagan era and devolve as CIL and other programs either collapsed or were put on starvation budgets, even while general public awareness of disability grew.
Devolving Social Welfare into Neoliberal Privatization.
Beyond merely slashing budgets through the ruse of tax cuts, the devolution of the welfare state took another route as well. Those parts of the system that could be developed as for-profit businesses, began to take over those function cut or reduced and the race to the bottom of privatization schemes was on. It turned out that much of the work to adapt parts of the public social safety net to fit many of the material needs of disability and other disadvantaged groups were of great utility for their transfer or devolution of public social services into private enterprises. The numerous community demonstration projects that had designed and rationalized various aspects of this service delivery system were relatively easy to adapt for the purpose of creating a business out of servicing the poor and disadvantaged. The media explained it as developing the service economy of the Eighties.
Much of the health care industry as it applies to poverty and disability is a particularly striking example. Federal Medicare and state Medicaid programs had always been administered through monopolistic contracts to private insurance giants like Blue Cross and Prudential. This set the administrative foundation for transferring most public service delivery systems themselves into private hands. This is what the neoliberalism of socializing the benefits to capital and privatizing costs to the people means on the ground. The rise of HMOs is an obvious example.
Many of the science, engineering and medical demonstration grants, started in the wake of the liberal policies to improve conditions of life for the bottom had run through their grant cycles by the Eighties. The benefits of these projects could be transfered not into the public domain where they might actually help those people who provided the social policy justification for them in the first place--- but, instead they were transfered to the world of capital for the purpose of developing routine exploitation of the very communities the original projects were supposed to serve through the service delivery system.
Questions.
The subsequent history, namely that of devolving the social, educational, health, and welfare, public service delivery systems into an entire privately held industry network devoted to nothing but the exploitation of the human condition, poses a interesting question of social policy. The question is, whether the reform minded demonstration projects in services and service delivery were ever intended to become part of the social safety net, or whether they were always intended to simply extend the conceptual basis of capital development into the service sector. Ultimately the answer doesn't matter much, since this is what occurred.
On the other hand there are two examples of current conflict that lead to the idea that the interest of capital development and extension into social services was always embedded in the social reform movements and projects, perhaps as an intended outcome, or perhaps merely as an incipient potential to begin with. These example are the development of the internet, and the development of genetic engineering. Both of these vast projects in their nascent form had their origins in and were concurrent with the liberal social reform projects that set out to modify the social welfare state in the 60s and 70s.
Like the social reform projects, the development of computers and genetics came with a modernist utopian mythology attached that oscillated between a future of infinite liberal promise and a future of utter totalitarian darkness. We are watching now, their turn as the lengthening shadows of evening fall across the immaculate lawns just outside their fortress like towers of progress.
Chuck Grimes