The CONSUMER CONCERNS
REPORT can
•        Involve your consumers in
identifying and prioritizing their issues

•        Reach out to new people with
disabilities in your service areat

•        Help your consumers to organize
the disability communityt

•        Produce data to support grant
requests, fund raising efforts,

•        and substantiate the need for
changes to decision makers.

The Consumer Concerns Report Method goes beyond the usual needs assessment survey to become an organizing tool. A working group of consumers designs the survey instrument, consumers respond on the survey to identify and prioritize issues important to them, and public forums are held for consumers to organize around the issues they
identified.

The consumers involved in the working group discover that, although they have different disabilities, they also have a lot in common. They also discover, by listening to others in the group, disability-specific issues they didn’t understood before, and start supporting each others’ issues. The Consumer Concerns Report is more than needs assessment, more than a satisfaction survey - it is a tool for productive consumer involvement.

The Consumer Concerns Report was used by the Research and Training Center on Independent Living at the University of Kansas around 1980 to identify and prioritize the concerns of people with disabilities.

The map the right shows the 8  statewide and over 30 local  applications conducted by the  RTC/IL. Their collective  archived data, as of 1989, was distributed to Congress to support passage of the ADA. Barrier Breakers has since  done 6 local applications,
including 3 in cooperation with the American Indian Rehabilitation Research and Training Center at Northern Arizona University, and is currently conducting two local and one statewide applications. The project takes 6 - 8 months to complete,   and will involve some staff time and Center resources in organizing and conducting meetings, and in printing, sending out, and getting back surveys. Barrier  Breakers charge is negotiable, from $500 for a really small CIL to $3,000 for a statewide application, and fifty cents per survey data entry charge. Barrier Breakers provides instructional materials, consultation, survey design based on information from consumer working group meetings, and conducts data entry and analysis. I believed in this project when I did it ten years ago at KU, and five years ago on my own, and I believe in it now.