As you know there are different ways of organizing personal assistance in the Finnish model: purchase service, service voucher and an employer model. The Threshold Association favours especially the employer model, because it provides the best starting point for the independent living. Personal assistance has been a subjective right for the disabled people in Finland since 2009.

The Law on Personal Assistance (PAA) was adopted in Bulgaria in 2018 after a long struggle by several groups of people with disabilities. An initial initiative was the Center for Independent Life (CIL) - a non-governmental organization of disabled people with over 20 years of expertise in protecting the rights of disabled people and their empowerment. In 2009, a group of people with severe physical disabilities, with the support of lawyers, studied the European and world experience and, especially that of Sweden and Norway, and developed a draft of the PAA. In it, they combined the best practices from the experience of other countries and complied with the current Bulgarian legal norms.

Personal Assistance - What should personal assistance look like?

Teodor Mladenov, Senior Lecturer at the University of Dundee and Coordinator of ENIL’s Independent Living Research Network

Introduction

This article is part of a special issue on Personal Assistance (PA) of the Disability Rights Defenders Newsletter published by the Independent Living Institute.

In our project Article 19 as a tool, we welcomed Alex Caputo Janhager as an intern. As a part of his internship and introduction to Sweden, he wrote a paper on the Independent living Institute and its activities, the Swedish political system and Sweden’s relation to international human rights norms. The paper is available at the end of this post.

• establish the right to direct payments of assistance services for as many assistance users as possible,
• enable as many assistance users as possible to exercise the degree of control over their services which they prefer at any given situation in their lives

Dara McLaughlin is a writer and visual artist. Her award winning poetry and stories have been published in literary magazines and anthologies. Her autobiographical poetry collection, A Map of This World, was released in 1999. Dara teaches poetry, coordinates writing workshops, and is an advocacy speaker for disability issues and education. Raised in New York, Dara moved to New Mexico six years ago,and works from her studio on a mesa overlooking The Rio Grande.

Keynote at the Expert Seminar
organized by the Hampshire Center for Independent Living
in Southampton, May 30 -31 1998

by Philip Mason

I am privileged and overawed to be the first speaker in this conference. A conference which is looking at the future in respect of those well known phrases 'Independent Living' and 'Direct Payments'. It is a privilege and also a responsibility because I need to strike the right note. I need to encourage but also to challenge.

So where do we start? Do we talk about the past; look at the present, and then think about the future?

We ought to do a little bit of all three and it is my job to start the ball rolling.