Thanks and congratulations to Adolf Ratzka on his 80th birthday

The Global Movement for Self-Determination of Persons with Disabilities looks forward to Stockholm today, November 20, 2023, where Dr. Adolf Ratzka can celebrate his 80th birthday.

without Adolf Ratzka A self-determined global living movement would be poorer in many of the ideas, and perhaps also in many of the initiatives that make the lives of many people with disabilities easier today or enable them to have greater self-determination.

So congratulations Martin Ladstadter From the Vienna Center for Independent Living BICEPS, Oui frivert From the Board of Directors of the advocacy group “Living Self-Determined in Germany” (ISL), Dina Radtkewho has been committed to Disabled Persons International (DPI) for many years, as well as Professor Dr. Sigrid Arnade And Otmar Miles Paul As the official spokesperson for LIGA Self-Representation Dr. Adolf Ratzka together on his 80th birthday.

When we talk about self-determination, personal assistance and peer counseling in Germany today and use these terms, it has a lot to do with Dr. Adolf Ratzka, who celebrates his eightieth birthday today.

doctor. Adolf Ratzka, who uses an electric wheelchair and a ventilator, not only played a decisive role in drafting the Swedish aid law, but also contributed to the decisive formation of the philosophy of chosen living and thus also the self-determined activities of German and Austrian life. Movement for people with disabilities. Uwe Frewert, from the board of the advocacy group “Self-Determined Living in Germany” (ISL), who has known Adolf Ratzka since his youth, brought this to the attention of kobinet-nachrichten.

“Adolf Ratzka, who comes from Bavaria and has lived in Sweden for a long time, today celebrates his 80th birthday – November 20, 2023. He is an important comrade-in-arms of the self-determined living movement and has achieved great things for our cause,” emphasized Martin Ladstätter from BIZEPS Vienna.

“I’m originally from Bavaria, I contracted polio when I was 17, and spent 5 years in hospitals due to the lack of wheelchair accessible apartments and practical assistance in daily life. When I was 22, I had the opportunity to move directly From the hospital in Munich to the student residence in Los Angeles to study there – with an electric wheelchair and a ventilator, without family or friends in the new country. Through a special solution, the state of Bavaria paid for me all my costs, including my aid, through the consulate German. And above all, I had the money to provide adequate personal assistance. “I used this to pay my fellow students as assistants, whom I hired and trained myself,” Adolf Ratzka wrote in the author’s profile on the Austrian online service BIZEPS INFO.

She continues: “In 1973, I came to Sweden to collect the materials needed for my doctoral thesis. In the following years she worked in Stockholm as a researcher on the issues of barrier-free housing and deconstruction. In the 1980s, I imported the international independent living movement to Sweden and founded the Stockholm Independent Living Cooperative, the first European personal assistance cooperative, whose work served as a model for Swedish assistance reform in 1994. In 1994 I founded the Independent Living Institute, through which we try Influencing social policy towards self-determination.

In the early 1990s, Adolf Ratzka was also instrumental in establishing and developing the European Network for Independent Living for People with Disabilities (ENIL). He did not return to Germany, among other things, because he would not receive the assistance available to him in Sweden for a self-determined life, as he repeatedly stressed.

But he regularly came to Germany to lecture on disability policy. Uwe Frevert, Sigrid Arnade and Ottmar Miles-Pohl agree that these were always great opportunities to exchange ideas with Adolf. Today they thanked Adolf Ratzka and wished them a happy birthday for his tireless commitment to self-determination and the participation of persons with disabilities.