Bridget Siljander
“Bridget Siljander calls them the ‘invisible workforce.’ Without them, though, the fallout will be starkly clear,” begins a story that ran last week in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, one of the biggest papers in my state.
The advocacy work that led to my being quoted was fueled by my participation in the Voices Institute National Leadership Program, so it seemed appropriate that I was en route to New York City to meet with the rest of the program’s training team when I received a call from the Star Tribune’s Gail Rosenblum. She was writing a story about the personal care attendance program, and when she told two of Minnesota’s strongest advocates for people with disabilities – Anne Henry of the Minnesota Disability Law Center and Anni Simons of The Arc of Minnesota — that she wanted to talk to a personal care attendant, they sent her to me.
I was more than happy to share the positive side of personal care work, a profession that has been denigrated in recent months in my state of Minnesota. I told Gail that the contribution of personal care attendants to society is tremendous, and she clearly understood what I and the others she had talked to were saying. Her article provided a balance to very negative press for personal care attendants that has run rampant this year.
There is no question that the 22 direct care workers who participated in the very successful Voices Institute leadership training retreat in the spring of 2008 became a tight-knit core group of direct care worker advocates. We still discuss the impact that this experience has had on our lives and how we will never forget the incredible growth that took place. As a group, we are building a grassroots movement bit-by-bit with passion and determination.
