CIL Serbia wants to share with all of you our joy as we have achieved something for which we fought for 10 years! We started our advocacy activities related to personal assistance service in year 2000 and since then we were promoting the idea through few action-research projects.
Our main goal was to make legislative changes that would include this service in Law for social protection, as one of the regular services funded by government. Since then in Serbia, four governments have been changed, and we were in most of the cases starting our fight all over again. At the same time we were organizing personal assistance service for limited number of users in Serbia, through different projects, of which the most important one was supported by the Irish Government for four years, showing in practice what quality changes in disabled persons life, provision of PA service could make.
Eventually, new Law for social protection was adopted by Serbian Parliament on 31 March 2011. in which PA service is included in group of services for disabled persons providing conditions for independent living. So after 10 years we have achieved our main goal!!!We would of course have to guard the principles of the service and quality standards, because as many of you know, the term “personal assistance” could be often interpreted differently. However, at the moment we celebrate this great CIL’s achievement, sending many thanks to all of you who have supported us in this fight for years.