World Disability Day, December 3, is an occasion for various actions – some “celebrate the holiday” and hold banquets, others raise serious issues. The Movement for Independent Living does not celebrate December 3 as a holiday but as an occasion for public discussion of pressing issues, which you can find in any country in the world. Unfortunately, Bulgarians with disabilities are among those with many problems – from the inaccessible environment to hard-to-reach employment, from outdated technical support for mobility and daily services to personal assistance, from inaccessible transport to the unreformed healthcare system.
This year we offer a discussion about personal аssistance – the tool of empowerment and support that helps people with disabilities to live independently even in the absence of accessibility in the environment (completely unacceptable fact!) or using loving relatives like personal assistants, who are ready to give up their own lives to care for a person with a disability in the family.
On the 3rd of December from 15.00 to 18.00, we will gather at the usual place lately – on the World Wide Web – to talk about personal assistance in Bulgaria. We will hear the story of Jamie Boling from Stockholm about the “gold standard” in personal assistance set by the Swedish government and active citizens with disabilities 30 years ago. We will find out from Minister Sacheva what the government’s view of the law is and its current effect. Users of personal assistance will share their personal experiences, and Teodor Mladenov will present a tool to assess the mechanism of personal assistance and the way it works to understand “where we are.”
To participate in the meeting, please register on this link until 01.12.2020.
The government is proposing changes to the Personal Assistance Act again, passed only a year and ten months ago, only showing the need for adjustments. But unfortunately, these are not the changes that await people with severe physical dependence, but on the contrary – to the detriment of the people most in need of personal assistance.
Of course, we cannot fail to state our position and state that the proposed amendments to the Personal Assistance Act again do not achieve the main goal of the personal assistance mechanism, which is a qualitatively different political instrument fоr social assistance or social services such as we know them well enough in Bulgaria.
You can read the full text in the form of attachments in Word or PDF.
Personal assistance is “an instrument which enables a disabled person to lead an independent living (IL). Personal assistance (PA) is the direct and targeted financing of people with disabilities to pay the assistants for the work that a person needs because of a disability.
PA should be provided on the basis of an individual assessment of needs, depending on each person’s life situation and at prices appropriate to the cost of labor at the internal market. People with disabilities should have the right to hire and manage their assistants and to choose the employment model which best suits to their needs. Funds made available for PAs should cover the salaries of the assistants, their other costs arisen from their employment and legal relations, such as contributions for the employer, as well as the costs of providing the service itself, such as administrative and peer support for the beneficiary of personal assistance. “
On the occasion of the European Day for Independent Living of People with Disabilities, this year we decided to take a virtual action – we invited our Facebook friends to put a picture of a black T-shirt labeled “The system kills them” on their profile picture. Our invitation was to all who agree that in Bulgaria social policy does not in any way improve the lives of people with disabilities, on the contrary – it leads them to think about euthanasia, to mothers dreaming to die after their children.
Today, September 14th, protested! We joined and supported the protest of parents of children with disabilities, which began in the garden near the National Assembly building. Its route was determined by the municipality and would go before Parliament (behind the monument of Tsar Osvoboditel) and from there to the Council of Ministers and in particular the MLSP, where the parents would make a heap of plush children toys.
On February 14th we went to Lukovit where we organized a celebration of St. Valentine’s day – To make friends with love, along with the young people from the community. We talked about love and flirting, played interesting games and sang songs. For our pleasant and cheerful mood much helped the hostess of the event Yva Doichinova and the famous rocker Vasco the Patch who is our dear friend.
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