“Self-Help” is mostly self-explanatory. It’s about helping yourself. It’s about tackling the problems and barriers you face as personal challenges to overcome through your own individual effort and personal growth. For disabled people, it is grounded partly in the “Medical Model” of disability — in which disability is mainly something to be overcome by disabled people themselves, not really a social problem for anyone else except family and certain medical and educational professionals. They pretty much take what is thrown to them.  

In the more general sense, “Activism” is cooperative action aimed at some kind of broad social improvement — by changing laws, regulations, policies, and practices. In the Activism approach to disability, disabled people seek to improve all disabled people’s lives by working together to dismantle external barriers they all face, including physical inaccessibility, badly-designed, poorly managed benefits and programs, and ableist attitudes and practices in everyday life. The Activism approach is related to the “Social Model” of disability, in which the problems of disability are not individual impairments or deficiencies, but rather formal and informal outside forces and institutions … such as government, businesses, social practices and traditions, and unexamined prejudices.

Arguably, there are even competition slogans:

Self-Help: “The only disability in life is a bad attitude!”

Activism: “Nothing about us without us!”  

EVV hurts the individual who is trying to use consumer directed services.  Don't discriminate against us