National Leadership Program, Spring 2020
John “Jack” Rukeyser
John “Jack” Rukeyser was a Nonprofit Management Fellow in RespectAbility’s National Leadership Program for the Spring of 2020. RespectAbility is a nonprofit organization fighting stigmas and advancing opportunities so that people with disabilities can fully participate in all aspects of community.
Rukeyser was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he lived for five years before moving to the coastal town of Rockport, Massachusetts. However, Washington, D.C., has become his new home during the school year since he started college there in the fall of 2017.
That school is American University, where Rukeyser is currently a junior on track to graduate in the summer of 2021. There, he studies Communications, Law, Economics, and Government in addition to pursuing a minor in History.
From a young age, Rukeyser worked alongside people with disabilities, volunteering at his local food pantry and community meals center. There, he realized that the most prevalent commonality among people who regularly came to the evening dinners was having a disability. Rukeyser hopes that his time at RespectAbility will help him understand the barriers and misperceptions that the disability community faces in a society that measures people on their profitability, not their individual strengths.
Rukeyser is happiest when he is road-tripping. Driving is his passion. He loves exploring new places and everything about the automotive world. He is fascinated by the underappreciated diversity of environments, neighborhoods, and cultures that can be experienced within just a short drive or on the way to a destination that flyers miss by about 30,000 feet.
