Howell, the Beginning of Organizational Inclusion

Dohn Hoyle, Partners in Policymaking Faculty Member, Activist and Organizer
21. Howell, the Beginning of Organizational Inclusion
I think we talked very much about person-centered planning and people's dreams being realized and all this kind of stuff. And the other group said, "Okay, it's Medicaid." As an organizer, you say, "Whoa, that's pretty big. Let's slice that a little bit." So, they began to work on what you do now and they decided they would concentrate at that point on possibility of a waiver.
We already knew what 1915 C waivers looked like, and that was what some states had already jumped on. And so that's, we decided that's what we'd try to do. And when you do some of this, you do some investigation. So, you have to learn what you're talking about first before you can wield a group as having any authority. They know what they're talking about and how to approach it, and so on and so forth. And we brought in people to talk about what was going on.
And so we said, okay, let's find out what we like and see if some other states doing what we want. As we looked and looked at that, we discovered there were some people who knew what the landscape looked like better than others. So Colleen Wieck got invited and other kinds of people, and the heads of Medicaid in some states got invited