A Slight but Important Language Change

Over the past 10+ years, the "DD" in the name of my blog has stood for "Developmental Disability."  Starting today, it also stands for "Defending Democracy," since nothing could be more important in our city-which-one-day-will become a state.  I will still be focusing primarily on issues important for the disability community, but, as reflected already in my profile, " I strongly support statehood for DC, where I have lived since 1978, since without it no DC resident, disabled or non-disabled, will ever be fully empowered."  It's obvious we have a real fight ahead of us, so let's get busy!

PARTICIPATE IN THIS IMPORTANT SURVEY

While preparing for next Monday’s DBH performance review hearing, I also want readers to be aware of the survey being conducted by Georgetown University’s School of Medicine on the experience of people with disabilities and their caregivers with mental health services here in DC.  If:

- you or someone you care for relied on supports from 35 K before it closed

- you are a disabled person who has interacted with one of the DBH community service agencies

- you are a caregiver who has interacted with one of the DBH community service agencies

- you have experience supporting people with disabilities at one of DC’s community service agencies

Then this survey is for you!  And if Georgetown gets good participation from the community, the (confidential) information they collect will be indispensable to the DC council and to DBH itself as they focus on needed reforms to better serve DC residents.  As you know if you’ve been reading my blog lately, I’m very focused on this topic right now, and very much looking forward to the outcomes of the Georgetown survey.  Here's a short description:

"[Georgetown is] looking for participants who are either adults with physical and/or mental disabilities, the direct caregivers of adults with physical and/or mental disabilities, or community-based mental healthcare providers practicing in the DC area. The primary goal of this study is to identify perceived barriers to mental healthcare access in participants with disabilities and their caregivers…By collecting the perspectives of both patients and healthcare providers, the hope is to gain a better understanding of the experiences of the disabled community and…to continue addressing the barriers to mental healthcare access that still exist today."

For more information, take a look at the attached flyers for people and caregivers and for community providers, and be in touch with Mary Tresvalles (mat321@georgetown.edu) with any questions.  Please help if you can!

REGISTER TO TESTIFY AT DBH PERFORMANCE REVIEW

I want to share a quick follow-up (thanks to Marcia Huff in councilmember Henderson's office!) about the upcoming DBH performance hearing.  The link to sign up for this hearing on February 3 is now live. 

Also, DBH responses to the committee's preliminary questions are due by January 27 and will be posted on the same link after they are received.

FY 2026 Performance Reviews Upcoming!

At last Saturday's Project ACTION! meeting, I reminded folks in the chat about upcoming performance review hearings before the DC council.  Here is the schedule:  DC council performance review calendar.  This is the first phase of DC council deliberations in preparation for the FY2026 budget.  A second phase of hearings, probably later in March, will address the budget itself.  

You'll see that - as was the case last year - the DDS performance hearing is quite late, not until March 3 - which will not provide much time between the hearing and the mayor's budget proposals.  As indicated in my previous blog posts in September, October and December of last year, I also have my eye on DBH during this budget season - that performance hearing is coming up soon, on February 3, so if you plan, as I do, to testify at that hearing, keep your eye on this link which should open up for witness signups in the next couple of days.

As you prepare for your testimony, and for your advocacy more generally, please recall this message that I included in an email on January 8:

As you read in my last post of 2024, there will be some continuity in the DC council’s oversight of DDS starting in January.  In fact, there is a lot of continuity in the council overall:  as you plan to testify or to contact your councilmembers over the coming year, you’ll want to use this page from my blog as reference: DC council contacts.  Another page in my blog, Terms and organizations, provides background on some of the terminology I use in my blog posts for your background.

The above resources will be helpful references for you as we come together in our advocacy throughout 2025 and beyond!  Very best to us all in this new, and challenging, year - 

Carol Grigsby (she/her/hers) is a dedicated advocate, focused on advancing rights and increasing opportunities for people with developmental disabilities in Washington, DC. A former member and chair of the DC Developmental Disabilities Council, I currently serve on several local groups focused on issues affecting the disability community. In addition to advocating for full inclusion of people with disabilities in our local community, I strongly support full rights and representation for residents of DC, where I have lived since 1978, since without real democracy no one in DC, disabled or non-disabled, will ever be fully empowered. Opinions in this blog are my own.

Some Good News for the New Year

This will be brief, and is certainly my final post of 2024!

I didn't want to let the year end, though, without confirming that our favorite DC council staffer, Sebastian Weinmann, wrote last week to say that DDS will remain under the jurisdiction of the council committee chaired by his boss, councilmember Janeese Lewis George.  At such a challenging time for the DC budget, and for DC more generally, this continuity is very welcome.

As you celebrate the turn of the year, add to your list for early 2025 a plan to testify at the DDS performance review hearing, to share your experience with DDA, RSA or both, with DC councilmembers.  As for me, I also plan to testify at the DBH performance review, since that department also has profound influence on persons with disabilities in DC.

The coming year will require courage and determination from all of us - so get ready!

CATCHING UP!

It’s hard to realize that I haven’t posted to this blog since mid-October.  Strangely, though, as I check websites that I would normally rely on for updated information, I find that they also have fallen behind.  Oh well, it’s been that kind of fall (now feeling like winter).

The last time I wrote, I was looking forward to the DC council hearing on the Psychiatric Institute of Washington and other psychiatric facilities, which took place on October 28.  Unfortunately, the nature of the hearing was somewhat different from what I had expected, and in spite of conversations I had had with Christina Henderson’s staff, barely a word was breathed about people with disabilities who may find themselves in any such circumstances.  Here is the written testimony I submitted after the hearing.

Like many of you, I was rattled by the election result and am concerned about what it could mean for DC.  We already need to be concerned about the state of the FY 2026 DC budget, and the election puts things even more in question.  I also had very sad family news which slowed me down even further in November, but am trying to put myself a bit more into the holiday spirit.  A wonderful holiday party last night, sponsored by Health and Joy, was a great start, although traffic from the lighting of the national Christmas tree caused problems for some of the attendees!

A good opportunity to see fellow advocates before the holidays are upon us, and to think ahead to 2025, will come when Project ACTION! holds its periodic in-person meeting downtown on December 14 – contact Tiffany Yuille to RSVP.  

As you prepare to testify at the DC council’s upcoming performance review hearings - just two months from now - something you may find helpful is the new “Civics Download” that the exclusively DC-oriented news source The 51st is making available - sign up for their newsletters, and make a donation while you’re there if you can – we want to keep this source alive as we head into uncertain times.

See you in the New Year, or (maybe) before!

TWO EVENTS YOU WON'T WANT TO MISS

I’ll be brief, but I want to remind you about two free, but immensely worthwhile, events coming up that you’ll want to take in if you possibly can next week:

• First is the annual meeting of the Quality Trust – which, despite the sound, is not a dry discussion, but rather a hugely enjoyable evening gathering where you can enjoy a few refreshments, visit with friends in a quiet setting near Gallery Place, and hear a little about what QT has been up to over the past year.  It’s Wednesday evening (October 23) and well worth your time, so register here:  Quality Trust October 23
• Second is DC’s annual all-day Employment First summit on Friday October 25, at MLK library in that same neighborhood.  Here’s all the information you need, along with registration information:  Employment First October 25.  This is a great opportunity for networking, learning about new initiatives to encourage employment of people with disabilities in our community, and just generally have a great time.

Now – rush to a computer and register for both of these important events!

UPDATES ON DBH AND ON THE DDS BUDGET

In my most recent blog posts, I’ve written about developments at the Department of Behavioral Health (DBH) that warrant attention from disability advocates (DBH proposed legislation and DBH and people with disabilities), and about the early-stage discussion on September 27 of next year’s Department on Disability Services (DDS) budget (Preliminary DDS budget discussion).  Here, I’d like to give a brief update on these issues:

• DBH.  I had a productive conversation earlier this week with councilmember Christina Henderson’s senior policy staffer, Marcia Huff, to follow up on the concerns I had raised in my two blog posts above.  I learned from her that the proposal to lengthen the routine detention period in psychiatric hospitals has been removed from bill B25-692, which is good news.  At the same time, she told me that, partially in response to the recent DRDC report on the many ongoing problems at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington, or PIW (Unsafe and Unprotected), there will be a hearing about PIW before the council on October 28.  They are looking for people to testify, in either written or oral form, and she is interested in particular in hearing about the experience of people with disabilities who have found themselves at PIW.  If you have any experience to share, you should contact Marcia at mhuff@dccouncil.gov.  Also, on the separate issue of the closure of 35 K psychiatric services, if you are a person, or the family member of a person, who was receiving support at 35 K before its closure, please also reach out to share your experience with Marcia.
• 
  
• DDS budget discussion.  At the DDS forum on September 27, DDS director Andy Reese gave a brief presentation (the final Power Point listed on this page: DDS Friday forum Power Points) about the current (FY 2025) budget and the likely stringency in next year’s budget.  The session then broke up into smaller groups moderated by DDS staff, in which participants were asked to propose areas where greater budget efficiencies might be possible, or if increases are proposed, how those would be offset.  Since the largest amount of the DDS budget goes for long-term disability supports from DDA (as always, see Disability-related organization and terminology if you’re confused about the terms I use), that is where most savings will likely need to be found. A broad variety of issues came up in the breakout groups.  The ideas for potential savings that most caught my attention were:  1) pursuing SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits for people who qualify; and 2) examining more closely the cost of some services that DDS now contracts out.  However, even if you weren’t there on Friday, you may want to take the trouble to weigh in with your ideas to director Andy Reese,  andrew.reese@dc.gov, but do that only after you’ve reviewed the recording of the session, which can be found here:  DDS September 27 recording. 

Carol Grigsby (she/her/hers) is a dedicated advocate, focused on advancing rights and increasing opportunities for people with developmental disabilities in Washington, DC.  I am a former member and chair of the DC Developmental Disabilities Council and currently serve on several committees and groups chaired by DC’s Department on Disability Services. In addition to advocating for full inclusion of people with disabilities in our local community, I strongly support statehood for DC, where I have lived since 1978, since without that no DC resident, disabled or non-disabled, will ever be fully empowered. Opinions in this blog are my own.

DDS budget for FY 2026: in on the Ground Floor

I'm sending out a quick note today as a reminder that tomorrow, September 27, at noon, the Department on Disability Services Friday forum will be dedicated to a discussion of priorities for the FY 2026 budget.  That may seem far away, but FY 2026 will start on October 1, 2025, and preparations will begin ramping up very early in 2025.  You'll recall that DC's FY 2025 budget was much tighter than in years past (FY2025 budget update), and FY 2026 will be at least as tight.

This time, the Friday forum will require RSVPs, so contact Charlisa Payne if you'd like to be a part of the discussion:  Charlisa.Payne2@dc.gov. 

DBH: Below the Tip of the Iceberg

My last blog post about bill B25-0692 ("Bill B25-0692 needs disability community involvement") has elicited a lot of comment, and also unearthed other concerns about how DBH interacts with the disability community in DC.  (See DC Disability-Related Organizations and Terminology.)

First, with respect to the bill:  I was very pleased to hear back immediately from Committee on Health chair Christina Henderson (chenderson@dccouncil.gov) in response to my blog post.  She informed me that “the legislation was not jointly referred to the Committee on Facilities and Family Services which is why there was no hearing with that Committee on this bill. At the hearing in July we had testimony from several witnesses representing the disability rights community.”  She further invited me to discuss the bill further with her staffer, Marcia Huff (mhuff@dccouncil.gov), who has since contacted me.  I’ve appreciated the responsiveness, and plan to follow up. 

But beyond the bill, my blog post surfaced another issue, this one not before the council.  That issue is the abrupt closure, in less than two weeks, of the DBH program at 35 K, which for many years has provided top-drawer psychiatric services for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.  As best I understand it, DBH had already indicated in its FY24 budget that it was planning to phase out direct services such as this one and to redirect people toward its community implementing partners (DBH core service agencies).  However, those actually receiving the services at 35 K were only given a few weeks’ notice of the October 1 closure.  Given how extremely difficult it is to locate psychiatric services of any kind, much less psychiatric services for those with co-occurring disability and behavioral health issues, this short lead time is truly unthinkable.  DBH owed, and owes, it to the people with disabilities that it serves to provide more advance notice of proposed changes.

And we mustn’t think that it stops there.  DDS has been trying for a long while, not always with great success, to foster closer coordination with DBH.  And why? Well, think about it.  If someone calls 911 about someone with a disability:

• If they’re lucky then a community response team (DBH community response) will be deployed instead of, or with, the police;
• They may then be taken to CPEP, the Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program location (CPEP) OR
• They may wind up at the much-investigated Psychiatric Institute of Washington (PIW) for psychiatric detention; AND
• In the most extreme cases, a disabled person can be charged, tried in court, and sentenced to be institutionalized at St. Elizabeth’s (St. Elizabeth's).

All of these, with the exception of PIW, are directly administered by DBH, and PIW, the only one that isn’t, receives a huge number of the psychiatric referrals from DBH.  But DBH is set up, by and large, to serve people with behavioral-health issues but not cognitive, developmental or other disabilities (and even less so, now that they’re closing 35 K!).  We’re seeing more and more people with unrecognized disabilities, or with dual diagnoses of disability and mental illness, being served by behavioral-health entities, so there needs to be even greater collaboration happening between DBH and DDS – which mostly means that DBH and the DC council need to recognize this and make sure the outreach to DDS, and to the disability community more broadly, occurs on a regular and ongoing basis.  And we, the constituents, need to watch DBH and any bills affecting DBH in the DC council, much more closely. 

Start by letting DBH director Bazron (DBH "Ask the Director") and Committee on Health chair Christina Henderson (again, chenderson@dccouncil.gov) know you have a stake in the outcome of bill B25-0692, and the DBH’s abrupt closure of 35 K.  Let your voice be heard, and do it today!

Do you know something more about this issue?  Want to correct something I've written?  Comment below!