Independence Empowerment Center

An old friend mistakenly introduced me as a “social worker” a couple of weeks ago. That’s all too often what happens because of misconceptions about where I work. Although there are plenty of social workers who do work at centers for independent living (CILs), it is certainly not the standard. Nor is the standard that we are medical professionals. In fact, CILs do have their roots in people with disabilities struggling to escape the boundaries of medicalization and other kinds of fields where “authorities” or trained professionals are considered to be the experts.

The Independent Living Movement approaches service delivery differently than other programs that were built upon the medical model. Key to our service delivery is consumer control which means our consumers have the right to educate themselves (perhaps with help from us) and to decide what will best meet his or her own independent living needs (again, perhaps with help from us). Keeping with this philosophy, our consumers also have the right to make their own choices, even if that means making their own mistakes.

We do not do “intakes” here, nor do we do “case management.” We do set up records in order to meet our reporting needs, in order to record the goals our consumers have set for themselves and in order for us to have reminders of goals set and where our consumers are on their own timelines to meeting those goals, but we do not do the clinical intakes of other professions. And our follow-up is not case management, but touching bases with our consumers. In fact, we appreciate phone calls from our consumers who provide their own updates rather than the one-sidedness of only us following up with them.

CILs are unique from other models because we are not trying to “fix” our consumers. There are other things for us to try to fix and those things are out there in our communities. Those things come in the form of attitudes and values about disability that say a person with a disability is “less than,” or structural barriers that serve to keep us out, or policies that result in nursing homes being the default for people leaving hospitals rather than home and community based care. That is why advocacy is such an important aspect of what we do.

Our work is huge and when I say “our work” that does include you! IEC follows the tradition of CILs across the United States. We are grassroots—people with disabilities working with people with disabilities with the ultimate goal of independent living as we define it for ourselves.

From Summer 2006 Newsletter

by Mary D. Lopez, Ph.D.