HOW TO HELP

We provide information and referrals.

In the late 1970s the unfulfilled need of consumers for peer-reviewed information services was the strongest motivating factor in establishing this agency. Reliable information resources were not available to people with disabilities and their families.

CDR Reports, our monthly newsletter, is now in its twentieth year of providing information about issues of interest and concern to our community. The newsletter is sent to over 5,100 people and agencies every month in every state of the Union, and e-mailed to dozens more.

Without endangering the privacy of our members, we occasionally allow selected agencies to send materials to our membership. However, the list is never given to other agencies. The other agencies provide their materials with postage to our staff who then put on the mailing labels.

This year the Center for Neighborhood Technology, with whom we have collaborated for over five years, has held a series of community forums about transit needs in order to develop a report from the grassroots of each community. Many readers have received their information. We hope you have attended the forums, found them interesting and worthwhile while you helped develop this important report.

The Clerk of Cook County, David Orr, has provided letters to Cook County residents on our mailing list on several occasions. We hope this information has been helpful and welcome.

Our web site is due for new features, including our long-promised key word index of links to other web sites. Lisa Holzer, who has volunteered her expertise and time to run the site since she designed and launched it in January 1996, has been hard at work planning these changes with her expert team of volunteers. They are interested in hearing your reactions to the changes — when they are made. We welcome comments, suggestions, or complaints about the site at any time.

When we stopped counting the hits on our web site several years ago, we were receiving 11,000 pageviews a day. The e-mail it generates is amazingly varied — and personal — in the requests for assistance and information. This year staff has responded to several hundred e-mails requesting information and referral.

Our referral staff has worked harder than ever this year to provide assistance to people with inquiries — by phone, by e-mail, or in person — to more than a thousand formal intakes. The most frequent requests are regarding the educational rights of children and information about CDR; employment rights of adults (In 2000-01, it was most frequent.); housing rights and availability; and job placement. Other requests were for legal referrals, transportation rights, and information about disability benefits.

Referral staff has also developed new resource information sheets for the most frequent areas of inquiry, e.g., special education and youth issues, and employment issues. The sheets have been passed out at information fairs, e.g., the DHS ADA Celebration and MOPD's Access Chicago and Employment Fair. Others are currently being developed on housing issues and benefits issues.

More about CDR's video, "Inclusion: A Special Education Dilemma"