News

Rockville, Maryland, Sept. 23 – For more than 20 years, Dr. Victor Santiago Pineda has spearheaded initiatives to advance the principles of access and inclusion in the US and abroad. Pineda moved to the United States from Venezuela when he was seven years old because he was denied a right to an education. As a wheelchair-user, he grew up in Orange County and was 12 years old when the ADA was signed into law. By the time he graduated high-school, he realized that he had benefited from rights in the United States that were missing in many parts fo the world. He was driven to understand why some parts of the world advanced while others were left behind. He completed a dual degree in Political Economy and Business Administration. He continued on to a master’s in City and Regional Planning from UC Berkeley’s prestigious College of Environmental Design. His mentor, Judith Heumann, encouraged him to continue his studies and training, and completed a Ph. D. in Urban Planning from the University of California, Los Angeles. [continue reading…]

RespectAbility mourns the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The NAACP and others have noted that former Pres. William Clinton, when nominating Justice Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, referred to her as the Thurgood Marshall of women’s rights. We in the disability community recognize that, as the author of the landmark Supreme Court decision, Olmstead v. L.C., 527 U.S. 581 (1999), she is the Thurgood Marshall of disability rights as well. Justice Ginsburg often spoke about how her Jewish background – and growing up in the shadows of the Holocaust – led her to be an advocate for equality of all people, including those with disabilities.

Often hailed as the legal linchpin of independent living for people with disabilities, her powerful decision mandated that people with disabilities should live in the least restrictive environment possible. The opinion begins with a technical reading of regulations, but its centerpiece is really Justice Ginsburg’s recognition of the value and humanity of people with disabilities, and the danger of shutting us away. [continue reading…]

Rockville, Maryland, Sept. 18 – Workforce development for people with disabilities has not only been Jaime Pacheco-Orozco’s job for the past twenty years but also his passion. The Assistant Executive Director of the City of Los Angeles Department of Disability, Pacheco-Orozco manages the day-to-day operations of the department and oversees the budgetary, legislative and strategic planning processes. Put simply, however, his job is to ensure that people with disabilities are afforded equal access to and opportunity for fully integrated employment and education.

Pacheco-Orozco earned both his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Yale University, and serves as the Chair of the Yale Alumni Schools Committee for the Central Los Angeles area. As a person with disabilities himself, he understands well the misconceptions and stereotypes held by society towards this population: he was born with a congenital hip disorder (which required hospitalization and leg braces to adjust), has a history of stuttering, and developed epilepsy as a result of a traumatic brain injury. [continue reading…]

Los Angeles, California, Sept. 18 – A new episode of Disney Channel’s Emmy Award-nominated series Big City Greens is breaking barriers when it comes to ensuring authentic deaf representation. In the “Quiet Please” episode, the Green family visits the city library hoping to find a book that will spark Cricket’s interest in reading, but they quickly run afoul of a strict, eerie librarian. Determined to keep the library a quiet place, she threatens to throw them out if they make any sound. Cricket’s sister Tilly notices two deaf library patrons communicating via ASL, giving her the idea that her family can communicate in the same way. While Tilly is the only family member to know ASL, they use that as inspiration to communicate through charades-like hand gestures. [continue reading…]

With 25 years of experience at The Coca-Cola Company, Vincenzo Piscopo knows the importance of shaping workplace inclusion through philanthropic involvement. As the Community and Stakeholder Relations Director for Coca-Cola, Piscopo manages company relationships with disability, veteran and Hispanic organizations and advocates for these communities internally.

Born and raised in Venezuela, he received a bachelor’s degree in Economics, an MBA from Carnegie Mellon University and a master’s in Creativity from Buffalo State University. In his tenure at The Coca-Cola Company, he has served in several different areas of the organization: Finance, IT, Marketing and Innovation. [continue reading…]

Los Angeles, California, Sept. 17 – A new film recently premiered on Netflix that is very intentional about meaningful representation and authentic casting. All Together Now features Anthony Jacques, who is on the Autism spectrum and Gerald Isaac Waters, who uses a wheelchair. Both Jacques and Waters’ characters are multi-dimensional and not defined by their disabilities.

“As an actor with a disability, we get a lot of roles where the role itself is involved with the disability,” said Waters, who plays Chad, and uses a wheelchair on screen and in real life for mobility. “To have one come by where he just so happened to be in the chair, I thought that was really great. It’s really important to see we can do any role and it doesn’t have to be completely circled around our disability.”

Waters’ character Chad is part of the lead character Amber Appleton (Auli’i Cravalho)’s group of friends. Cravalho herself has publicly talked about seeing mental health professionals. The film also portrays the topics of mental health, alcoholism and experiencing homelessness, as Amber and her mother find themselves living in a school bus. Nearly 4.2 million youths and young adults experience homelessness each year but it is not often portrayed in family and teen content. [continue reading…]

Taken from RespectAbility’s “Opening Your Virtual Gates” High Holiday Toolkit

Providing Accessibility Before the Event: On your organization’s sign-up form, ask registrants if they need any accommodations to effectively participate in the event. Additionally, provide a name, Email, and phone number for someone who can assist people with accommodation requests.

Providing Documents to Attendees Prior to the Event: If you are using any documents or a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation for your online event, distribute it to your attendees in advance. This includes online Siddurim or Machzorim, or source sheets for sermons or discussions. [continue reading…]

Washington, D.C., Sept. 14 – With 50 days left until Election Day and with many voters deciding to vote early, candidates across the political spectrum are reaching out to a previously ignored block of voters: people with disabilities.

Polling conducted earlier this year showed that more than half of the electorate in the battleground (59 percent) self-identifies as having a disability (16 percent), having a family member with a disability (32 percent) or having a close friend with a disability (11 percent).

According to Rutgers University, 14.3 million citizens with disabilities voted in 2018. Those voters will be crucial as both Democrats and Republicans vie for votes this year. In response to this opportunity, campaigns and candidates across the country are going on the record about their policies and plans to help Americans with disabilities. Those plans are being documented online by RespectAbility, a national nonprofit organization fighting stigmas and advancing opportunities so people with disabilities can fully participate in all aspects of community.

RespectAbility is a non-partisan group and have been thorough in reaching out to Democratic and Republican candidates equally. The team at RespectAbility is still actively soliciting responses to their questionnaire from campaigns that have not yet done so.

RespectAbility has been actively engaging with campaigns to both educate them about disability issues and to get campaigns to complete RespectAbility’s 2020 Disability Voter Questionnaire.  You can find full, detailed converge online at https://therespectabilityreport.org. [continue reading…]

Initiative Highlights Importance of Behind the Camera and Development of Talent Pipeline

RespectAbility congratulates The Academy for their diversity and inclusion initiative. This has the potential to bring about some real change in the entertainment industry. We are especially pleased to see people with disabilities included, as too often disability is not included in diversity conversations.

It is important, however, to ensure that the narrative is good. It’s not enough to just be included – we have to be included in an authentic way. And by having one its categories focus on behind the camera roles, this initiative has an opportunity to prevent this – by truly hiring people with disabilities behind the camera in an inclusive way. This presents a huge opportunity to tell diverse, complex stories of the disability experience, and avoid falling into the trap of inspiration porn, which assumes that anyone with a disability must have it so much worse, and uses people with disabilities to make nondisabled people feel good about themselves or to make them do something, like exercise.
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