the Beacon Review
May 3, 1991
[This contains the text from ADAPT 1773 and 1772 for easier reading.]

Title: Local activists making an impact on our daily lives

Drawing of the heads of three people: Beth Gallegos, Sam Lusky and Wade Blank. Their names are printed beside their heads.

Title: Striving to make a difference

by Kerri S. Smlth

According to a recently released national survey, most Americans are moral bankrupt, and many live in an existential waste.

We're a nation of liars and cheaters, according to the survey results. Twenty five percent of the survey respondents even said they'd abandon families for $10 million.

But there are still people who spend their time fighting for what they believe ls right and just.

The Beacon took a quick head count this week, and came up with dozens of local activists trying to make a difference. Three are profiled below.

WADE Blank
Last week hundreds of demonstrators led by Denverite Wade Blank, a 50 year old minister who's made a career out of civil disobedience. invaded the Baltimore headquarters of the federal Health Care Finance Administration, waving signs, shouting demands; and honking horns.

Most of the demonstrators, who belong to Denver based American Disabled for Attendant Programs Today (ADAPT), rode wheelchairs into battle with the federal government . Blank is founder and co director of ADAPT.

Their aim: to up divert aid dollars to a national home care program, so that disabled and elderly people can remain at home instead of in a nursing home.

It's a controversial, but then Blank ls no stranger controversy. He marched with civil rights leader Martin Luther King, demonstrated against the Vietnam War and saw the birth of the feminist movement at Kent State before moving to Colorado in 1971.

"I call myself a person who teaches empowerment," Blank explained. "As an able boded‘ man, l set the pace and target issues, and then hand the power over to others."

The process apparently works.

Before July of 1978, Denver, like most cities, lacked wheelchair accessible public transit. ADAPT activists commandeered two buses and shut down the Colfax Broadway intersection long enough to get the job done.

"We slept in the streets for two nights while supporters sent over sandwiches," Blank recalled.

Today, wheelchair accessible public transit is the law of the land, and Japan and other countries are following the American example.

Blank's metamorphosis from minister to leader of the disabled people's civil rights movement occurred when he worked at a Lakewood nursing home ln the early 70s.‘

"I moved here to lick my wounds after the shootings at Kent State," Blank said, [missing text] ...ing my Volkswagen behind a U Haul. My family thought I'd gone berserk, because, I had, a master's degree in theology and was working as a nursing home orderly."

He didn't like what he saw there.

‘I tried to make life bearable by reforming the system, but by 1974 I gave up and tried moving residents into ' apartments,” Blank said.

A Legal Aid lawyer helped Blank and disabled residents sue the facility, along with the federal and state governments, Thirteen years later, in 1987, the disabled plaintiffs won a class action suit and collected $26 million.

While the lawsuit dragged on, Blank founded “The Atlantis Community,” a home health care company currently serving around l50 disabled and elderly Coloradans; The company also runs a home health aide certification “training program.

ADAPT activists also influenced the l988 national nursing home reform bill (Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act) that protects residents‘ rights, among other things.

And last summer President Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act, another ADAPT driven initiative. The bill requires
all restaurants to be wheelchair accessible by January 1992.

In the meantime, Blank said he and other ADAPT activists will “keep hitting the streets until the government changes national policies towards disabled and elderly people.