Young-Voices

Youth Voices is a program, implemented to push for ratification of the CRPD. Leonard Cheshire Disability works with groups of young people with disabilities, providing them with training in advocacy and campaigning skills – only to name two examples.

They get their message across through films, music, street theatre. Whatever works.

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Åse Kari Haugeto

Thank you so much for setting up such an interesting and eyeopening event. It was a very well organized conference with a big variety of speakers. I found it especially useful during the sessions where the audience was allowed to ask questions.

Thank you also very much for letting me inform the audience about the conference www.ud2012.no we are going to arrange in Oslo June this year.

Charles Siegal

I was inspiring to see so many people from the disability rights community from around the world take part.

I would very much like to participate next year and will try to submit materials related to employment issues. I believe those are essential to the disability community.

Esther Sivan

It was indeed an honour and a pleasure (!) to participate in this very well organized and very innovative and interesting conference. The opportunity to share knowledge and to associate with so many people from different countries dealing with the same issues that we deal with, daily, was exciting and of high value. Thank you for this!

Some people came up to me after the Access to Justice session and we discussed some issues, so I hope the session has contributed to the discourse and more important – that it might have practical implications on some other states.

Focusing in next year’s conference on employment is just the correct choice!

Agenda-22_Anders-Surra

Agenda 22/50 is model for how to plan the implementation of local/regional disability policy plans in accordance with the UN Standard Rules/UN Convention.

Agenda 22 was created in 1996. It has been put into practice in many Swedish municipalities. In 2001, the model was presented at a European level and, since then, it has been presented and put into practice in many European countries.
The Agenda 50 strategy is new and will be presented in Sweden during 2011.

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JAG-Member-Hillevi-baking-cake

The group of people with intellectual impairment are among those with a high representation of living in institutions today. Through this service these people not only do not have to live in larger institutions, or even in smaller ones. They can live lives choosing activities that make them happy and well-established. This decreases tendencies to outbursts and difficult behaviour, and leads to happier lives and access to the human right of full participation.

For further information please visit Website of JAG and Good Practice Article

More in German on http://www.bizeps.or.at/gleichstellung/

Swedish Personal Assistance Policy

Personal assistance has been described as ‘a revolution’ and is considered the most important achievement of the disability reform. The system of cash payments towards eligible individuals created a competitive market for personal assistance services consisting of about 15,900 assistance users, 230 local governments and over 1,100 private entities, these last employing a total of 60,000 (full-time equivalent) personal assistants.

It enabled assistance users and their family members to return to work and provides jobs to people who often would otherwise live on unemployment insurance. It has been estimated that taxpayers have saved a minimum of SEK29 billion since 1994, compared to the costs of local governments’ services!

Visit www.independentliving.org or www.enil.eu to know more about the independent living movement