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Serious question, I thought self advocacy groups were useless until I sat in on one in Akron
I work construction and got hurt on a job two winters back, messed up my shoulder and ended up with a partial disability rating. For months I just let my case worker handle everything because I figured that was their job. A guy on my crew kept telling me to check out a local self advocacy group that meets at a library in Akron every other Tuesday. I blew him off for a while because I thought it was just people sitting around complaining. I finally went in March and within 20 minutes someone showed me how to request my own records and read the denial letter I had been staring at for 6 weeks. Turns out the denial was based on a form my doctor never actually signed, and nobody had caught it. I filed the appeal myself with two people from that room helping me word it, and it got approved in 31 days. That letter had been sitting on my kitchen table and I kept thinking I needed a lawyer to even understand it. If you are waiting on someone else to fix your paperwork, what is actually stopping you from going to one meeting and asking one question?
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charles_knight10d ago
My uncle went through something kind of the same with his pension years back. He kept waiting on the union rep to file the right forms and the guy kept saying it was in the works. Two years went by. My uncle finally drove down to the union hall himself, asked to see his file, and found out the rep never sent anything in. Not one page. He got it sorted in a couple months once he started making calls on his own. The point is nobody cares about your case the way you do. A case worker has forty other people on their desk and your letter is just another folder to them. You sat in one room for 20 minutes and fixed in a month what you had been stuck on for weeks. That tells you everything about who was actually holding things up.
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