National Leadership Program, Spring 2018
Adrienne Baez was a Public Policy Fellow in RespectAbility’s National Leadership Program. Working with RespectAbility staff, she researched special education and employment programs for people with disabilities nationwide to help state and federal agencies improve their programs and services.
Baez is a graduate of Butler University, with a Bachelor’s degree in psychology; during senior year her capstone project was desperately searching for an accessible place to live where the human population was higher than the number of cornstalks. She found it in Washington, D.C., where her academic passion developed into discovering pathways between what motivates the disability community and the assistance society can provide. Baez combined it with her amorphous disabled-do-gooder period in college and her personal battles for accessible options to become an advocate.
Before working at RespectAbility, Baez studied the connections between physical disability and its psychosocial effects at American University, with the generous support of the Osteogenesis Imperfecta Foundation and her OI community. Bolstered by her experience at RespectAbility, she hopes that she will contribute to disability research and services as a program/policy manager in the future. She hopes to land somewhere in the nonprofit sector where community interaction and policy change meet, where she can be an active and helpful part of her own disability community.
Baez wrote three pieces during the 2018 Spring Fellowship. Read them on our website:
- RespectAbility Submits Comments to New York State Boards of Regent to Promote the Success of Students with Disabilities (January 19, 2018)
- Steve Bartlett: Becoming a Better Advocate – Someone Who’s Been There (February 15, 2018)
- New York State Falls to 40th in the U.S. in Jobs for People with Disabilities (February 22, 2018)