Thank you for your interest. We truly need people to come forward and help. Here are a few possibilities. Please take your pick.
1. Spend time studying this site. Familiarize yourself with our advocacy platform. Sign our address book so that we have your email address and can correspond with you. We can send you the Cautionary Tale and A Call for National Standards email. If you agree with our philosophy, you can distribute it to all the people you know.
2. Get involved with the Brain Injury Association (BIA) affiliate in your state. Call them to see if they have survivor participation on their board of directors. Interact specifically with any survivor board of director members.
3. See if your state BIA affiliate has a survivor council. If they have one, get on it. If they do not have a survivor council, ask that they start one. And then get yourself onto that survivor council.
4. Share the Brain Injury Network (BIN) national standards for college level programs for people with abi (acquired brain injury) and tbi (traumatic brain injury) with your Brain Injury Association affiliate. Ask them to work on the creation and dissemination of such standards nationally and in your state, on behalf of survivors like you. Ask the BIA to seek out and lobby postsecondary institutions and systems to initiate such national standards.
5. Ask the BIA to work on passage of a college employee mandated reporter law in your state. Such a law would require college employees to report criminal conduct against college students with brain injuries to the authorities. The law would apply when a student with a brain injury is enrolled in a college's disability or brain injury program. You can refer your BIA affiliate and others to www.braininjurynetwork.org if they want to study the proposed legislation. (The legislation is just a prototype. Each state, with input from people like you, could develop something similar for that state.)
6. Join a survivor support group in your area and talk up these issues. If there is no survivor support group in your area, check with your local hospital, rehabilitation facility, college, school, BIA affiliate, or other disability organization about starting one up.
7. Contact your state legislative representatives (state assembly members and state senators). Share the proposed mandated reporter law with them. Ask them to sponsor and vote for a mandated reporter law in your state.
8. Find out whom in your state oversees college level disability student services, departments and programs. (It could be a Chancellor's office, a commission, or several kinds of oversight.) Research these people and if you can find their email addresses, send them the Cautionary Tale and the Call for National Standards. In the alternative, correspond with them via snail mail (regular mail sent via the post office). Ask them to create abi/tbi program standards at their level, which will be required in all colleges in your state.
9. Write to your federal (representatives and senators) congressional people, especially if they are on the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force. Ask them to work on the creation of national standards for abi/tbi post-secondary programs. It could perhaps be done by the USA Department of Education in partnership with many other entities such as the various college systems, the Brain Injury Association, the National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the TBI model projects, the Protection and Advocacy organizations, AHEAD, CARF, and many, many others. We at BINSCI (the Brain Injury Network) would be delighted to throw in our two cents since these programs are all about services for us.
10. Join the getinteractiveSABI forum on this site. SABI means Survivor, Acquired Brain Injury. It is a site strictly for survivors that is partially our advocacy discussion.
11. Ask your family and others who do not have brain injuries, but who are interested in discussing brain injury, to join the FEASIBLE forum on this site. If you want a forum in addition to SABI, you can join FEASIBLE, too. It helps our overall community if you join both forums.
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