As State Policy Manager for RespectAbility, state legislators often share with me that they or their spouse, child, parent, sibling, or close friend has a disability and they would like to be more active and involved with disability issues, but don’t know where to start.
Currently, there are not very many state legislatures that have disability caucuses. Legislative caucuses are groups of legislators that come together across party lines to pursue shared goals in areas such as homelessness, veterans issues, the environment, and issues impacting senior citizens. Caucuses give members from all political parties the opportunity to work together to sponsor educational briefings for other members on their topic and encourage legislation. Some states that have these caucuses are Connecticut, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio.
RespectAbility’s state policy team has launched an initiative to encourage the creation of a Legislative Disability Caucus in the state legislatures that currently don’t have them. Beyond giving legislators the opportunity to work together collaboratively to promote disability legislation and educate their fellow legislators, having a disability caucus in every state would give our community a more efficient way of targeting legislators who have expressed an interest in our issues and tapping into their network.
In 2024, RespectAbility will work toward setting up disability caucuses in a limited number of states and learn from our experience about how caucuses are created, how to best identify interested legislators, and how to expand our effort to all state legislatures in the following years.
If you are a state legislator, staffer, disability rights organization, or grassroots advocate who would like to partner with us in setting up a disability caucus in your state legislature, please contact RespectAbility’s Senior Director of Policy, Stacy Cervenka, at StacyC@RespectAbility.org.
