by John Fritz

Many years ago I was the President of a self-advocacy group with other people from a Sheltered Workshop. My friend told me that the agency was planning to close the cafeteria in the work center.

Some members of my group were not pleased about it, because there were a lot of people who were diabetics and there were people who worked for minimum wage in the cafeteria. Some of the staff also were concerned because some people may try to sneak getting candy from the vending machine and it could be life threatening for those with serious diabetes. The cafeteria also provided some job training for getting a job outside of the workshop.

I decided to have an emergency meeting with the group, without the advisor. I did this because I didn’t want the advisor, who worked for the agency, to get in trouble or get fired for helping us.

We then learned that they were going to build a new workshop and they were going to have reporters come through to do publicity around the idea of having a new building. At the press event the agency director praised the cafeteria- talking about how it was providing many jobs. This was the very cafeteria that they were planning to close down. So, I went and talked to the director about it. He said to me “why don’t you do something about it?” One of the reporters heard me talking to the director. He found my number and called me up.

The reporter wanted to know what was the story about the cafeteria closing and the feelings people in the self-advocacy group had. So I told him that we had a lot of people who need nutritious food and it wouldn’t be good if they replace the cafeteria with vending machines. To my surprise, the story about the new workshop ended up on the front page of the community newspaper, but in the story they said that “consumers are threatening to go on strike” about the cafeteria being closed. This caused a big hub-bub and people who were going to give a lot of money to the agency for the new workshop were calling threatening to withdraw their funds.

That did it. They decided not to close the cafeteria.

However, the agency did not like what we did. They fired our advisor and assigned an Assistant Director to watch over the group. At first, I thought it was an insult. In reality, once the Assistant Director got to know us and be at our self-advocacy group, she became our biggest ally.

After that, I had so many people wanting to join the self-advocacy group and get involved. They saw what we accomplished and started to speak up about a lot of things.