Self-Advocates of Washington
Planning Meeting on Helping People Who Live in Institutions
John O’Brien
Aug. 1998
Self-Advocates of Washington held a planning meeting on Saturday, 30 August 1998 to come up with ideas for helping people who still live in state institutions. John O’Brien and Connie Lyle O’Brien facilitated the meeting and made this record from the notes they took and checked with people at the meeting. People in the meeting made all of the points in the record; John and Connie made the points into sentences and arranged them.
The membership and the board will talk about all of these ideas at the annual meeting in November; and the board will talk about some of the ideas at its next meeting.
We think that…
• The people who live in institutions now…
…have exactly the same rights as any other citizen
…have the very same right as the people who have moved out of institutions in past
years to move into community living with the individual support they need to be safe and successful
• We, and the many other people who work to make communities better, now know a lot about how to help people succeed outside institutions. No one has to live in an institution just because of their disability if they get the help they need.
