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From: Charlotte.Ferris@f5.n382.z1.fidonet.org (Charlotte Ferris)
Newsgroups: misc.handicap
Subject: Re: Two points
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Date: 3 Oct 90 14:31:34 GMT
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Index Number: 10814

Bill, thanks for your reply; it brought several things to mind, which I will 
go into briefly now, and if you or anybody wants more discussion on it, I'll 
be glad to elaborate my ideas and give feedback on yours, if you desire...
        You mentioned that, according to the by-laws (or whatever) that 
govern your ILC, 51% of the Board of Directors must have a disability"of one 
sort or another"...I think you will find that many ILC's use this pattern as 
a model, imitating the first great ILC's in Boston, Berkeley, and (Chicago? 
Champagne-Urbana?), as did ours here in Austin. However, what I have 
observed is that the power-wielders and decision-makers were often more 
interested in fulfilling the letter rather than the spirit of the law in 
that many times people were "found" to have a disability and appointed to be 
on the Board, when in fact their so-called "disability" was so minor as to 
be negligible, i.e. an attention-deficit, or a minor case of asthma, or 
hypoglycemia.....in other words, the people in power wanted them on the 
board, and their minor problems were played up as disabilities and counted 
as part of that 51%. Now I must say that, as a severely-disabled staff 
person of some significance in that organization, I did not feel that the 
Board represented either mine or my fellow disabled staffers' best interests 
or those of the disabled clientele that we were being funded to serve. I 
felt they had little or no understanding of severe disability and were not 
interested in gaining any......anyway, all this is very dirty water under 
the bridge, and all I'm trying to say is that I suspect that the disability 
politics of people on the Boards of Directors in these ILC's, whether they 
be disabled or no, are sometimes not right-on. That's the way it was here, 
and now our organization almost doesn't exist anymore. It sure doesn't have 
any credibility in the disabled community here.
        Bill, this only scratches the surface. But back to you. 
 

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