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 believe you Marta.
All I can write about is what was here, what I saw, what the people around me were doing. I have to admit, I never read a thing about it---it was right in front of me most of the time, so who needs to read about it. And after its gone, what do I care?
Now I know. Here look at this dribbling shit:
http://www.independentliving.org/LibArt/ILhistory.html#anchor3
``...In his book The Hidden Minority (1979), Sonny KIeinfield writes, "They make revolutions in Berkeley." As Roberts sees it, "I arrived just in time for the revolution."
The revolution he was referring to, however, was not his own. Having known discrimination firsthand, Roberts became a civil rights activist. As the sixties progressed and Cowell opened its doors to more students with severe disabilities, it occurred to Roberts that blacks and other racial minorities were not the only groups that could fight the system. He and his peers at Cowell formed a group called the Rolling Quads. They began discussing ways to break the segregated, caretaker quality of life on campus.
One reflection of that quality affected Roberts' opportunities for romance. For years, he had been told he couldn't operate a motorised wheelchair; in Berkeley, he was pushed everywhere. Then he fell in love. It became inconvenient to have a pusher. In a day and a half, Roberts learned to navigate his own wheelchair. "It taught me the power of motivation," he says. "She jumped on my lap and we rode off into the sunset."
For less romantic pursuits, Roberts found there was strength in numbers. He and the other Cowell residents "began to entertain the selfish, ambitious hope that they could get out of the hospital and live like the able-bodied" (Kleinfield, 1979). They submitted a proposal for federal funding to establish a Disabled Students' Program on campus. In 1970, the program -- and the revolution -- got under way.
At the time, the program's philosophical underpinnings were revolutionary. Among them was a rejection of the medical model: If anything needed to "get better," it was American society; if anybody should be in charge, it was not the doctor. People with disabilities, said the Berkeley group, were consumers, not patients. Like all consumers, they needed to select rather than settle.
The Program office was bombarded with consumers who wanted, among other things, to eliminate segregation from their lives. By 1971, off-campus consumers were a sizable proportion of those seeking services. The realization that nothing existed out there beyond the university walls prompted Roberts and his associates to establish a Center for Independent Living (CIL) for the community at large...''
Okay, where to start? Well, Klienfield can kiss my ass along with the idiot who wrote the above.
God this pisses me off.
Roberts was not actually in Cowell or at UCB at the time the PDSP proposal was written, since he got a part-time teaching job at Nairobi College in Burlingame or Palo Alto or some such place. His main contribution was knowing about the Office of Special Services and that education project grants were available.
John Hesseler, Mike Fuss and Larry Langdon did all the work. Roberts wasn't around for the Rolling Quads either. Nobody was talking about `consumers' or `clients'. There was only `us' against the `assholes'.
As for `...the realization that nothing existed out there beyond the unviersity walls prompted Roberts and his associates to establish a Center for Independent Living (CIL) for the community at large...''
Aghhh! Jesus, fuck this shit.
CIL actually started at PDSP (Physically Disabled Student's Program, UCB) at a desk that I built for Larry Biscamp and Phil Draper to use. Ed Roberts was teaching part-time in Palo Alto or travelling somewhere. The only Roberts in town was his mother, Zona Roberts who was running attendent referral, and UCB special admissions and pre-registration for disabled students at PDSP. Oh, yeah and Ed's younger brothers Mark and Randy--both going to Berkeley High School and working as part-time attendents.
Larry Biscamp was one of the students in the Rolling Quads, and Phil Draper had just moved to Berkeley. Draper and Biscamp both lived in the community already. DVR kicked Biscamp out of student housing (Cowell) when he dropped out of UCB, and for his political activism against them. He was a para and got an apartment with some other people. Biscamp and Roberts didn't like each other and later when Roberts moved back to Berkeley, Roberts and Hessler pulled a power play at a CIL board meeting. They got Biscamp kicked out as director of CIL---then installed Roberts in his place. By then Biscamp and Roberts were mortal enemies.
Anyway, it was Biscamp (drop-out), Draper (greaser), Konkel (snotty blind grad student in Public Policy), Zukus (math), and some other people who got together and wrote the first proposal to RSA (Rehabilitation Services Administration) to fund a community based services project. When they finally got the money, they moved out of the apartment that housed PDSP, (thank god), and moved up the street to another roach infested apartment. At least the roach part was true.
A lot of the social policy frame work for putting the Berkeley CIL project together came from the UCB City Planning Dept (profs, Kalminoff, Colignon, Tetis) and its disabled grad students (Herb Willsmore, Judy Taylor, Bob Metz, and my non-disabled ex-wife, Ruth Grimes). These were some of the other people involved with Biscamp and Draper.
I can't believe how pissed off I am.
These little simpering histories are just complete garbage. If anybody out there is doing research on any of this history, especially the crap on Berkeley---well it's eighty percent bullshit.
Chuck Grimes