Recruiting Family Stories

As a follow up to “The Waiting Game” and the “No Paid Services Caseload” campaigns, we are planning to publish a booklet of stories that show people who have received services from DDA as a result of improved funding and policies in recent years.

We want to show the Legislature that the money they have appropriated for the unserved (in the 2013 and 2014 legislative sessions) is actually helping many people in a very real way all over the state.

An additional benefit will be to show the variety of routes that were used to gain services, such as:

• Calls to the DDA hotline;
• Help from a peer support network or organization (Arc, Parent/Family Coalition, Parent to Parent, Self-Advocacy group etc.);
• Connection to a case resource manager.

This will give us valuable information about those successful processes and routes that we can use to educate and help more people.  If they now receive MPC, but still need respite or another DD-specific service, hopefully that will be information we can also use.
If you or someone you know has moved from the No Paid Services caseload to paid services within the past few years, and you would like to share your story for this campaing, please contact Betsy McAlister at: dbmcharger(at)frontier(dot)com. Parents can remain anonymous, but we would hope to be able to have representative stories from as many parts of the state as possible.

This should be an exciting opportunity to showcase our advocacy and continue to support families and individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities.