To supplement my last post encouraging readers to track the adventures of MI-ADAPT via twitter.com, I thought I’d add a few words about what ADAPT is exactly. I lifted the various pieces this description off of the national org’s website, but feel it accurately describes the MI chapter as well.
The Main Issue at Hand: For decades, people with disabilities, both old and young, have wanted alternatives to nursing homes and other institutions when they need long term services. Our long term care system has a heavy institutional bias. Every state that receives Medicaid MUST provide nursing home services, but community based services are optional. Sixty seven (67%) percent of Medicaid long term care dollars pay for institutional services, while the remaining thirty three (33%) must cover all the community based waivers, optional programs, etc. Families are in crisis. When support services are needed there are no real choices in the community. Whether a child is born with a disability, an adult has a traumatic injury or a person becomes disabled through the aging process, they overwhelmingly wan t their attendant services provided in their own homes, not nursing homes or other large institutions. People with disabilities and their families will no longer tolerate being forced into selecting institutions. It’s time for Real Choice. The Community Choice Act provides an alternative and will fundamentally change our long term care system and the institutional bias that now exists. Building on the Money Follows the Person concept, the two million Americans currently residing in nursing homes and other institutions would have a choice.
History: ADAPT has a long history of organizing in the disability community and using civil disobedience and similar non-violent direct action tactics to achieve its goals. In 1983, as a project of the Atlantis Community in Denver, ADAPT began its national campaign for lifts on buses and access to public transit for people with disabilities. ADAPT started as American Disabled for Accessible Public Transit. For seven years ADAPT blocked buses in cities across the US to demonstrate the need for access to public transit. Many went to jail for the right to ride. In the early 1990s the County and City of Denver and Denver RTD placed a plaque at the intersection on Colfax where the Atlantis Community held the first inaccessible bus and this was one of the first historic markers in the struggle for disability rights. Wade Blank, a founder of Atlantis and ADAPT, used to take all visitors to see it, and always brought a bottle of Fantastic to clean it up. ADAPT played a major role in gaining passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, ADA, particularly in ADA’s stringent requirements relating to accessible transit, and its being seen as a civil rights law. Passage of this bill has meant victory for ADAPT in our struggle for lifts on buses. Once the transit issue was won and access was begun to be guaranteed, ADAPT felt it was clear attendant services must be our next issue. In a national planning meeting July 1990, ADAPT targeted the reallocation of one quarter of the federal and state Medicaid dollars from institutional programs to consumer controlled community based programs. ADAPT now also stands for American Disabled For Attendant Programs Today. Since then, ADAPT has decided our name will no longer be an acronym (it’s hard to fit all the issues into those letters) so we are simply ADAPT, but we are still fighting for community services and supports for people with disabilities of all ages.
