Sigh

Earlier this week, Wednesday I attended the 211 meeting which bills itself as an advisory board meeting, and it’s amazing how quick I can get back into my cynical self – – actually maybe my cynical self is never really left just lying dormant but lurking just beneath the surface of my elderly retired face.

It seems the 211 advisory board, as I understood was to wrestle with the issue of building the disability awareness call list in case of emergency. That is not the appropriate title but is the best I can come up with right this second. The advisory board which seems to be called “211 disability advisory board“ is now wrestling with some age-old questions regarding disability, nomenclature, and the training of 211 operators in dealing with “disability calls“. In the 18 or so months I put in it  as their disability operator, also as part of my mission to assist in the development of a training procedure to train nondisabled operators and how to respond to disability calls. I think we had a fairly gifted VISTA volunteer try to develop such a training regimen, it did not happen. Now, I believe I don’t think it can, I believe those folks who could be disability operators are born disability operators. I still believe the operators can be trained to better assist the caller wanting disability information but I doubt the operator will give us good of information as the caller might get from a disability specific organization or cross disability organization like an independent living center.

The 211 director, who was at this meeting, was quite insistent that the call be handled from a standpoint of assisting the caller to break the chain of events that got them to the point of this call. In my experience this is almost psychobabble. Many times/most times the caller needs money to meet their needs their immediate needs, whether it’s dealing with an eviction, transportation food or medication. The caller needs immediate fix not a long-term explanation or historical examination of self to see how they got to this disposition.

The meeting ended by developing an agenda for the next meeting in late August. I have been charged with finding some other individuals who will sit on this board and be able to give their input as to what 211 operators need to know to best respond to disability related calls. I was hesitant upon hearing this and I still am but I am also become interested in putting out an invitation to a number of my colleagues in disability work to join me at this meeting late August to examine this question. I’m quite interested to find out what they will say and what the 211 director will hear. This almost excites me more than it depresses me because the problems that exist out there for people disabilities are the problems of the low income since most individuals with disabilities are low income. Will this battle ever end?