Educators regard people with brain injuries in their programs as
students whom they educate. Educators operating educational think
tanks (and there are quite a few of them at the University level) are
in the business of studying us and designing best practices,
including best teaching strategies for us. Their aim is to decide
what are the best ways to help students achieve their educational
outcomes. Such educators view us as students just as doctors view us
a patients. However, there is another way to look at it.

As survivor advocates we regard ourselves as consumers. Consumers
generally make demands for quality service from service providers. To
us, educators and doctors, and anyone else paid to provide services
to us, need to provide quality services. So we survivor advocates at
the Brain Injury Network are espousing what we believe to be the best
for us. And we are making demands, as consumers do, for the best
practices and services.

When educators want to collaborate on what is best for us that is
certainly very useful. However, it is also useful for us to be
telling them what is expected from them. In the FEASIBLE forum we
started with the idea that we wanted ethics, empathy and action.

Basically it has been unheard of for people with brain injuries to
collectively demand much of anything. If you look at just about every
other group of people, they have organized. People who have a mental
illness, people with aids, breast cancer, multiple sclerosis, people
using wheelchairs, people who are visually impaired – they all have
their own organizations to support their advocacy agendas. They are
organized and campaign for what they want and need. People with brain
injuries do very little of that. We are told endlessly, that there is
someone else, some other advocate for us. For example, there are the
Brain Injury Associations, College Think Tanks, Governmental Bodies
such as the Department of Education, Department of Rehabilitation or
the Department of Mental Health, Medical Associations, Protection and
Advocacy organizations, Professional Rehabilitative Associations, and
the list goes on and on.

It doesn't help that we are often reminded of the superior brains,
expertise and talent of all of these other advocates. But we have to
remember that they are in the business of being of service to us (if
only most of them knew that), and if we could do it all by ourselves
what would we need them for? The point is, we do need them, and
their knowledge base, to help us. But we also have to stand up for
ourselves and demand that things for us improve. So we survivors in
one little corner of this universe are trying to say what we think we
need. And we are distributing some policy objectives. SabiSue at the
www.braininjurynetwork.org.