These rights must not be abrogated merely because a person has a mental or physical disability. Among these fundamental rights is the right to community living.
All people can grow and develop.
All people are entitled to conditions which foster their development. Such conditions are optimally provided in community settings. The Community Imperative was written by the Center on Human Policy at Syracuse University, under the leadership of the late Burton Blatt. The Community Imperative was written in response to organized opposition to deinstitutionalization and community living. Specifically, the Community Imperative was intended to counter a 1978 memorandum submitted by 10 national experts in hearings in the Wyatt case in Alabama that argued that only a small number of institutional residents could be expected to adjust to community living and that training programs were inappropriate for a substantial number of them.