For my readers who don’t know, I work at a center for independent living in Washington, PA.  Our name is Tri-County Patriots for Independent Living. We are run by and for people with disabilities. We are not a nursing home! Nursing homes and assisted living has tried to hijack the term “independent living”, but a CIL like TRIPIL purpose is enable and empower people with disabilities to live independent lives in their community equal to people who don’t have disabilities. We do this through Peer Support, Skills Training, Information&Referral, Advocacy, and Nursing Home Transition. I’ll address these core services in later post  as I write about my experience working for a CIL. I wanted to just give a intro before I jumped into my topic today. If you work at a CIL I hope you enjoy my posts but I also hope it will challenge you to make your CIL better for people with disabilities. So, my question today is  does your CIL have a community space?  Do you have a space  in which people can come together and learn what independent living is about? A place at the CIL where people are around others for  peer support and community building? At TRIPIL we do this  by having an internet cafe where people can come and learn new skills or just socialized. If computers are not a person’s thing, our cafe is big enough for people to just talk. We recently  been having Wii Wednesdays playing wii bowling. Trash talk among friends is always a fun time. Also, our CIL staff  work on the cafe side of our building so we are not hiding in an office or cubicle away from our community members. Having a community space is not all for fun, but is a great advocacy tool because it gives people a chance to role model independence for peers who are working toward similar goals.For example, I have cerebral palsy and when one of community members  see me working through the same struggles their facing, it encourages them to be independent too. I  gave a few examples about how our community space has helped us build up our local disability community and don’t be overwhelmed if your CIL does not have the kind of room we do, but do something. Get rid of waiting rooms and open your doors for your people. Let people come to your CIL and start learning to be independent. We CILs need to be the place where people can come to be empower. All our lives we been stuck in waiting rooms and having doors shut in our face, let’s not do it to our own people.

Note: This is the first post in a series of posts I’m doing about Independent Living.