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VERIFICATION of CIL SERVICE AREA, 2004

Why are we verifying your data? Last year we asked CILs to list the counties for which they received State and/or Federal funds to provide the 4 core Independent Living Services (advocacy, information & referral, peer support, independent living skills training), but the answers appeared to be inconsistent. Some Centers reported the counties which they are funded to serve; some reported on counties they perceive as their responsibility; and others reported the counties they are actually able to serve (capacity). We also must correct any data entry errors in the geographic mapping database.

Which CILs are included?: All U.S. CILs in the 50 States and the District of Columbia are included, not just those CILs which receive RSA funding.

How we count CILs: We use the governing board as the basis for counting CILs. For example, Alaska CILs in Anchorage and Fairbanks are both controlled by one governing board, so count as one CIL.

Defining Service Area Responsibility: “Responsibility” indicates that a CIL has assumed responsibility to provide the 4 Core IL services in a county as a condition of receiving State, Federal, or other funding, and/or the CIL Board has included the county in its 4 Core IL service area responsibility.

Defining Service Area Capacity: For consistency in determining “Served, Underserved, Unserved” please use the guidelines for Comparison of IL/CIL Service Availability, which was taken from the appendix of Michigan’s approved 2002-2004 State Plan for Independent Living. Michigan’s criteria may not quite match that of your State or Center, but we need consistent criteria in order to aggregate the national data. We selected Michigan’s guidelines because they recognize a difference between service responsibility and service capacity; include detailed descriptions, and were included in their RSA approved SPIL

How this data will be used: We will use your data to update and refine the CIL geographic distribution study we did in 1999 – the one NCIL has used in Drive for 75. Identifying counties which are covered by the 4 core IL services will produce a more accurate national projection of the current level of need for IL system support.

We will map the data related to both responsibility and capacity. We will report the total number of people with disabilities in each CIL’s service area, the geographic size of the service area, and the relationship between population and area. These numbers will be tied to the governing board which controls decisions for this total area. (Note: Massachusetts does not use counties or county equivalents as the basic unit for dividing responsibility among its Cities and Towns – but in order to include Massachusetts in our national analyses, we must use county level data. We will add a footnote about Massachusetts’ unique situation in our reports.)

Questions? Call Alexandra Enders at 406.243.2655 or email enders@ruralinstitute.umt.edu

Research support by US Dept of Education, National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research grant #H133B030501.  Opinions expressed reflect those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the funding agency.

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