The marchers camped out in parking lots or churches that had donated space. Restaurants donated food. There was a lot of other community support.

At the end of the march, about 1,500 people with disabilities and their supporters gathered in Upper Senate Park for a three-hour rally which included speakers, musicians and a comedian. One of the speakers was Yoshiko Dart, widow of Justin Dart, the father of the disability movement who died last year. She pushed a wheelchair with Justin's hat and boots. She said ‘You are the loudest voices of empowerment, the revolutionaries, the 21^st century. You are America the Beautiful. We will continue to march and fight to the end of time to free our people.’

MiCASSA has 600 organizational supporters, but Congress keeps refusing to act. MiCASSA stands for Medicaid Community Attendant Services and Supports Act. It would provide for a community attendant to live with a person with disabilities and help them with things like eating, toileting, grooming, dressing, bathing, meal preparation, shopping, chores, participating in the community and many other things. The person with the disability or their guardian could choose their own attendant and the method of paying the attendant. The state would pay the attendant the same amount that the state would have spent on a nursing home. MiCASSA would also cover the cost of moving from a nursing home to a home setting. It would cover rent and utility deposits, bedding, kitchen supplies and other necessities.

Information from ADAPT and Free Our People
http://freeourpeople.org/news/fopnr005.htm

 

Beautiful Cooperative
Living Space for Survivors

Zuzu’s Place is a working residential center which provides an alternative to corporate-dominated psychiatry. It is a cooperative living space for psychiatric survivors with affordable openings right now. To learn more go to http://www.zuzusplace.org

Info from MindFreedom  

Psychiatric ‘Day of Remembrance’

Psychiatric survivors have named Dec. 29 a "Day of Remembrance for People Labeled with Psychiatric Disabilities Forgotten in the Holocaust." Psychiatrically-labeled people were the first large group to die in Nazi gas chambers.

The systematic killing began on Sept. 29, 1939 in the Kocborow Institution in Poland. By the end of October, the Nazis shot several thousand patients in the head. By the end of December all the patients in the Strahlsund institution had been murdered.

The gassing of Jewish and Polish psychiatric prisoners in the Dziekanka institution began on Dec. 7, 1939 with mobile gassing trucks. The SS stopped the killing for Christmas on Dec. 19. By then they had murdered 595 Polish patients.

The T4 organization headed by doctors resumed the killing on Jan. 8, 1940. Dr. Widmann personally opened the gas tap in the presence of several other doctors. At this first gas shower experiment 10-20 people were murdered.

Info from MindFreedom Support Coalition International