Sponsors include Cast & Crew, Comcast NBCUniversal, Final Draft, Fox Corporation, Murray/Reese Foundation, Sony Pictures Entertainment, ViacomCBS and The Walt Disney Company

Summer Lab 2019 participants at The Walt Disney Studios. Credit: Jeff Maynard

Los Angeles, California, June 11 – After unprecedented competition from around the world, 30 individuals have been accepted into RespectAbility’s second annual Lab for Entertainment Professionals. This 5-week, 15-session virtual summer Lab series for talented people with disabilities interested in – and with experience in – development, production and post-production, including careers as writers, directors, producers, cinematographers, animators and other production roles, will take place June 16 – July 16, 2020. Participants include diverse people with physical, cognitive, sensory, mental health and other disabilities.

“This program continues building the talent pipeline of young and mid-career professionals with disabilities working behind the scenes while also enabling hundreds of studio executives to learn about the talents and benefits of hiring people with disabilities,” said Program Director Lauren Appelbaum, RespectAbility’s Vice President, Communications who leads RespectAbility’s Hollywood Inclusion efforts and authored the nonprofit’s Hollywood Disability Inclusion Toolkit. “While we will not be on location at studios this year like in 2019, we are thankful for all the studios that will be virtually hosting us beginning on June 16.” [continue reading…]

Los Angeles, California, June 10 – A coalition of more than 40 Jewish organizations, led by the disability nonprofit RespectAbility, is pleased to announce a new Jewish Disability Access & Inclusion Training Series. This seven-part series, which will run virtually from June 23 through August 11 is a collective offering to the Jewish world so Jewish organizations can welcome, respect and include people with disabilities from all backgrounds in the important work that they do.

Jewish organizations partnering in the series include the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ), Reconstructing Judaism, Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, Jewish Women International (JWI) and dozens of others. Eric Fingerhut, President and CEO of JFNA said, “We will have reached a major milestone in Jewish community building when we no longer need to identify ways to remove barriers to participation.” [continue reading…]

I hope that you are staying safe and healthy. Before I begin our weekly exploration of Jewish disability inclusion, I must begin the Shabbat Smile by noting that this is a gut-wrenching time in our nation. We are all dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and massive job loss challenges. Now the uprisings taking place across America have illuminated the impact of racism on society. The recent murders of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and Breonna Taylor by Louisville Metro police are a reminder that key parts of our criminal justice system are broken. The false accusal of two Black men for the drowning of Alejandro Ripley, a nonverbal 9-year-old with Autism, offers another example of the harmful impact of discrimination. [continue reading…]

Question: What do Shavuot (Shavuos) and COVID-19 have in common? Answer: The call for faith, prayer, and hope . . . and the comfort of cheesy (or non-cheesy) blintzes (or gluten-free blintzes). It is also said that if you put two blintzes side by side on your plate, then you have the visual image of a Torah. Nice, right? Experiential learning. [continue reading…]

With every day rolling into the next, it’s nice to know that in the U.S. the calendar marks that we have a long weekend. Memorial Day – America’s Yom Ha’Zikaron – is a day we set aside to remember all our military personnel who died while serving in the U.S. military, helping to ensure America’s four freedoms; freedoms that FDR articulated in his transformative State of the Union Address in January of 1941:

1. Freedom of Speech
2. Freedom to Worship
3. Freedom from Want; and, last but so relevant today
4. Freedom from Fear.

Yes, we underscore that FDR should have – and could have – done more to save countless lives during the Holocaust. Yet is also said that his powerful “Four Freedoms” speech and vision transformed our nation and the world. He projected the idea of all Americans pulling together (and needing to continue to do so) to face a moment of crisis.

Here we are, yet again, in a monumental moment of crisis. An ongoing moment where three of these four freedoms are in jeopardy: our freedom to worship remains remote and virtual; close to 39 million Americans’ freedom from want is now, at best, on hold; and freedom from fear – fear of the virus, for every inhabitant worldwide, awaiting a vaccine. [continue reading…]

Read the Toolkit

Washington, D.C., May 21 – The COVID-19 pandemic is causing organizations to transition many events and conferences that originally were in-person to virtual ones. The good news is that it is easy to make online events accessible to everyone if you know how. A new toolkit published on Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) by the disability nonprofit RespectAbility aims to help organizations do so.

A recent national inclusion study conducted by RespectAbility, in partnership with The Chronicle of Philanthropy and The Nonprofit Times, found that even before the pandemic, only 14 percent of people say their organizations use video captions to ensure people who are deaf or hard of hearing can use the content. Captioning services are easy to use and often are free and yet 86 percent were not even attempting to take advantage of such tools.

“We know the majority of people want to be inclusive, but they do not know what they do not know,” said RespectAbility President Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi. [continue reading…]

“In less than six weeks, amidst an unprecedented situation, USDA has expanded SNAP online purchasing to 36 states and the District of Columbia – nearly three-quarters of the states, covering 90% of SNAP households.”

Washington, D.C., May 22 – On Wednesday, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that 90% of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) households now will be able to safely access food during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is a major life-saving milestone achieved by the efforts of various disability advocacy groups, including the nonprofit RespectAbility.

In early April, RespectAbility Board Members Ollie Cantos, whose blind triplet sons are currently recovering from COVID-19, and Janet LaBreck held several virtual convenings for people with disabilities. During these gatherings, participants discussed the difficulties for people who are blind to socially distance while grocery shopping and conducting other essential business, necessitating the ability to shop online. [continue reading…]

Washington, D.C., May 22 – On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that 90 percent of households that rely on Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits will soon have access to safe food delivery online. This is a major life-saving milestone that is partially the result of a group of entertainment professionals, in partnership with the disability advocacy nonprofit RespectAbility, who created a campaign to ensure that people who use SNAP can do so through online delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Nationwide, 11 million Americans with disabilities depend on SNAP, also called food stamps, to pay for groceries. Prior to the pandemic, just six states allowed SNAP users to order food for delivery. With this week’s announcements, 37 states plus the District of Columbia soon will accept SNAP food stamps online. USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue also announced that more businesses and retail stores will accept SNAP benefits online. [continue reading…]

Washington, D.C., May 19 – As more Americans with and without disabilities are caught up in the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, people are wondering where to find answers to life-or-death questions.

What do I do if I’m a person with a disability and lost my job because of COVID-19?

You are not alone. A monthly report published by the University of New Hampshire’s Institute on Disability (UNH-IOD), shows that nearly one million working-age people with disabilities lost their jobs. That represents a 20 percent reduction of the number of workers with disabilities in our nation’s economy. There is a significant question whether those jobs will ever come back.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) website has a comprehensive run-down on what you as an individual with or without disabilities needs to know about accessing unemployment benefits if you are an eligible worker. [continue reading…]