Organizer’s Forum: Training New Advocates (starting with oppression, identity, and disability history)
How do you train disability advocates who are brand new to disability rights and community organizing? Before you engage people to speak at hearings or meet with legislators, how do you teach them disability rights, history, oppression, human rights, and how to envision a better future?
Speakers
- Naomi Ortiz, activist and writer, founder and former director of Kids As Self Advocates. Naomi will talk about training youth through KASA and other venues.
- Bob Hand, Resources for Independence Central Valley, Fresno, California. Bob will be talking about the Community Leadership Academy.
- Josue Rodriguez, ADAPT, Memphis, Tennessee. Josue will talk about the ADAPT Youth Summit.
- Amanda Beals, Paraquad, St. Louis, Missouri, with Ann Mangelsdorf, St. Louis Arc. Amanda and Ann will talk about the Tuscher Institute on grassroots organizing and a joint training project.
We will hear about a leadership training program in California, training at the ADAPT Youth Summit, and a new program in Missouri. Join us!
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 19th, 1-2 pm Eastern time, 12-1 Central time, 11-12 Mountain time, 10-11 am Pacific time
- Call in number: 1-213-342-3000
- Code: 193134#
To get an idea of who joins our calls, if you are interested in joining on Tuesday, please fill out this quick form!
CART: The call will have real-time captioning (CART)! The website where you will be able to view the captioning is https://2020captioning.1capapp.com. Username: forum. Password: forum. Thank you to the National Disability Leadership Alliance for sponsoring the captioning of this call.
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Background
The Organizing Workgroup of the National Disability Leadership Alliance hosts these calls the third Tuesday of every month as a resource for disability organizers, in an effort toward building the organizing capacity of the disability community across the country. They generally follow the format of a Welcome followed by 2-3 experts in a given area speaking for a few minutes on their experiences, advice and challenges. The calls include a 20-30 minute question and answer period.
To ask questions via CART: Sign-in to the Chat function on the right side of the transcript and type your question. One of the call facilitators will read out any questions posted there.
Because we want to maximize the generously donated CART services, we will begin the call promptly at 1pm and end the call promptly at 2pm (eastern time). A few other reminders about call etiquette:
- Say your name before each time you speak
- Speak one at a time
- Speak slowly and as clearly as possible
So you can mark your calendars now, Organizer’s Forums are held on the 3rd Tuesday of every month. If you have suggestions for call topics or presenters for upcoming topics, please email them to jlehman7@gmail.com or dcoleman@cdrnys.org.
Looking forward to talking with you all!
Date: 11 19 13
NDLA organizers forum
www.2020captioning.com
USA: 1.866.554.2099
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Real time Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
>> Jessica: This is Jessica
>> Speaker: This is Rebecca.
>> Jessica: Wait for others to get on the call.
>> Diane: This is Diane Coleman, hi, Jessica.
>> Jessica: Hi, Diane. Are you on the chat today?
>> Diane: Yes.
>> Amanda: This is Amanda.
>> Jessica: Hi, how are you?
>> Speaker: This is (indiscernible)
>> Speaker: This is (indiscernible).
>> Speaker: This is Bob.
>> Jessica: Naomi and Anne, are you on the call?
>> Speaker: Naomi is.
>> Naomi: This is Naomi. Can you hear me?
>> Jessica: Sorry. I was changing the codes on the call. Somebody said something to me?
>> Speaker: This is Bob.
>> Jessica: Giving people a moment to get on.
>> Naomi: Can you hear me okay?
>> Jessica: You sound great. I think people are still joining but I would go ahead and get started because you have a lot of great secrets and make sure we have time to hear from everyone. I’m Jessica and the co chair of the organizers forum along with Diane Coleman. Do you want to say hello?
>> Diane: Hello. Nice to have you all here.
>> Jessica: Want to introduce yourself? Diane, did you want to tell people who you are?
>> Diane: Sure. My name is Diane Coleman and co chair of this Organizing Forum and also a Steering Committee member and disabilities leadership alliance which is the organization to the call and that’s a group of organizations that are all led by people with disabilities, and there are 14 organizations including national for Independent Living, National Federation of The Blind, National Association of the Deaf and you get the gist of it, disability organization of groups by disabled people.
>> Jessica: I’m director of San Francisco disability action. I’m thinking let’s go ahead and do a quick introduction since I think we have a manageable number of peep on the call right now and mute everyone and give a little bit more information about the call. So I always start with the West Coast is usually the least who do we have here from the West Coast?
>> Speaker: This is Bob from Fresno.
>> Rebecca from Auburn, California.
>> Speaker: This is Michelle Garcia.
>> Speaker: This is (indiscernible). I don’t know if I count as West Coast but I’m in Tucson, Arizona.
>> Jessica: Start with southwest and midwest. Go ahead, folks.
>> Speaker: This is (indiscernible).
>> Speaker: This is (indiscernible).
>> Speaker: This is Amanda from St. Louis.
>> Jessica: How about the southeast? How about the northeast?
>> Speaker: Boston, Boston Independent Living.
>> Anne from Boston.
>> Speaker: Diane Coleman from Rochester, New York Not Dead Yet headquarters.
>> Speaker: Rihanna from AAPD in Washington D.C.
>> Jessica: Anybody from anywhere in the country that has not introduced themselves yet? I will go ahead and mute folks just to make sure it is easy to here. Hold on one second. I want to figure this out. Sorry about that. Since we do the calls once a month I always forget the technological things. This is for organizers forum and these calls are intended to support people in committee organizing in the disability community and disability rights movement and it is less about I was going to say it is less about issues, although we have changed that recently but we are trying to set up calls that are about looking at strategies and tactics that we can use to do more successful organizing, to get more people involved. A lot of focus on how we broaden on how people get involved and working with seniors and how are we looking at race, how are we thinking about working cross disability, all different kinds of issues and specific issues of the movements that we are working on we now do in alternate months. So this is more strategy calls and next month will be about a specific topic. I believe it is going to be about voting but we will let you know as soon as we know. And we are always looking for new topics and if we have ideas please let Diane or me know about that and as Diane mentioned it is a project of national leader disability alliance and they fund the captioning which we are grateful for. We have that set up and a chat room and forget to ask about anyone in the chat room and come back to that. And so you can always log on that and type in questions and Diane will read those out on the if you want to do that. We also have time for spoken question and answer at the end. So I do want to remind people, including myself, to speak slowly and clearly, and say your name before you speak. On this call we are now in a mode where everyone can un mute themselves but you start out on mute so to un mute yourself you will want to hit scar six and make sure our presenters get un muted before we move on. Purpose of these calls, which are once a month, always the third Tuesday of the month so if you like what you hear, which we hope what you do, go ahead and mark your calendar for the third Tuesday of every month but then we realize 1 hour a month is not enough time to get into the conversations and so we are working on creating some venues for ongoing discussion. We have a Yahoo groups listserv and anybody can join that, go to Yahoo groups.com and okay for organizers groups and click join. And we are on FaceBook as well as organizers forum. After the call I would encourage people to go ahead and put something up about here is what stuck with me or here is question in my mind and here is what I really like so maybe people that couldn’t join the call can hear more about it and continue the conversation. We are now on the NDLA website which is disability leadership.org and thank to Kristen for the Center for Disability Rights for getting information up quickly and we have a recording and transcript of each call, so if you miss a call and know somebody that wants to hear it, look on the website and get all the information or if you are wondering about the next call and you haven’t heard anything yet, check the website and that should be up there. What else? I think that covered it. I don’t think Diane will un mute herself with *6 if I forget anything. I will go ahead and introduce the topic for today and presenters. It is on training new advocates and e mail with starting with oppression, identity and disability history, really looking at when we get people involved to our brand new to disability advocacy how do we first train them and as Amanda Beals put it we often get into talking to somebody how to testify the hearing or how to do legislative visit but before we get there, how do we just start teaching people who may not have any background about disability rights, disability history and oppression and what does it mean to build power and what are human rights and civil rights and how do we really teach people to envision a better future so that we can work together for that. That’s a broad set of things we are trying to do here today and get ideas out on the table so how we can do that and support each other to do that. So the speaker let me get the right thing here to introduce them in the right order. Amanda Beals with Anne Paraquad and they are both from St. Louis and they have a joint training project they are going to share with us. Then we are going to hear from Bob hand who’s with resources for independent Central Valley which is in Fresno, California and they really pioneered a community leadership academy and a little bit more advanced how people can get on board and commissions and leadership role in the community and I know there’s not a lot of interest from other Independent Living centers and other groups in replicating that. And then we will hear from Naomi Ortiz and she will talk about her training and we have someone from ADAPT and talk about how they think about training people and some of the basics. With that I will turn it over to speaker to get started, each will have five minutes if it is okay I will try to let you all know when to wrap up. Amanda and Anne, hit *6 if you haven’t already to un mute yourselves to go ahead.
>> Amanda: This is Amanda Beals and I only have a little bit of time so I will go ahead. We are not meeting advocates where they are at in St. Louis. When they tried to engage people they weren’t ready, they directly advocated against their own interest or sabotaged their own meetings and sent out strategy to and made of three different levels of curriculum and specific places and development of a good advocate. So we have a foundational curriculum and then we have civics 101 and advocacy skills curriculum. They had solid foundation of an advocate first and we really found out you can’t effectively engage someone in advocacy if they don’t have the foundational knowledge. So I will talk mostly about the foundational curriculum and then Anne will talk about how to get there. Foundational curriculum is crucial. So many people in our community experience internalized oppression and we believe we deserve the negative things that are happening from us and comes from history of social policy and segregation, and so people use the idea of cost, limited resources as way to explain to us why they can’t or shouldn’t have to make something more accessible for us and the problem is that we believe it and we believe we are not worth the time or money it would take to fix our communities, and we have to move past the stage if they are going to be successful, so we feel this curriculum moves people past the stage and start out with interactive disability timeline and we talk about the good, the bad and really, really bad. With history people can see themselves in it, they see how it still manifests today and they see how the heroes and pride in the community and pride in themselves and human rights and civil rights and can’t assume everyone knows what expectations they should hold and goes over basic rights like employment and education, of course, community living and interactive to make them say is this a violation and if it is they have to talk about steps to confront and if actually are and gets people really interactive and talk about oppression and stereotypes, personal examples of the basis of our training and it helps them learn that these things are what contributes the problems in our communities and help participants see they are not the problem and understand what the problems actually are. What can you do about this and come up with their own problems, own examples in order to be a good advocate you have to see the problem but then you have to take it a step further and be able to offer solutions and tell them our heroes are the people who envisioned access that we have today. They didn’t wait for someone else in charge to come up with the solution. That’s not going to happen. So we do that activity on envisioning the future with them. What should it look like, what do you want to see and what do we need to do to get there. This really puts them in control instead of waiting for us to tell them what to care about and gets them at their core and their and empower to do something and move past the original training into more action and things to get involved and the training is intense, hands on, I think dialogue is important for the foundational work, small group activities and the base of all the trainings are the interest of the advocacy at the training and based on own interest and own values and not just yours. So with that really brief overview and turn over to Anne if she wants to talk about stuff done together and things seen in her people.
>> Anne: I was thrilled when Amanda approached me with doing the advocacy with some of our folks and no adaptations, two pieces of it, so when working with intellectual disabilities and could not have them in a 6 hour training for 1 day, so we split it into several days of 2 hour trainings which seems to work very well and I will say that the way this training is organized is it is very similar way that to me would want to organize advocacy training for any group and one of the pieces that to me was life changing or just very mind altering for a number of people that participated was the historical aspect of disability rights and I think until that moment many of the folks who came on the training had no idea about the past oppressions that occurred and it really helped give them a perspective to how things are now and I think it also helped them not only to say how far people’s rights have come for people with developmental disabilities but also really pointed out to them there’s a way to go. So, for instance, one of the women in the group has pretty involved physical needs and users communication device in order to let her needs be known and recently attended an event for her brother at a pub and she couldn’t come in because it wasn’t accessible because it was a fire hazard if she came in. Her family knew it was legally inaccessible but willing to get her up the stairs so she could hear her brother perform and staff can’t up here because of the fire hazards and she was willing to let that go. She was upset, she was angry but let it go and realized all the people that had had come before her and struggled with the same issue and decided not to let it go and been writing letters and doing things to try to change what happened to her and I think also for a number of people it let them see that they had come a long way and telling their story, part of what we had to practice, very effective because it allowed people as Amanda said what they are most they are most interested in and in being able to formulate what it was that they wanted to say to have time to practice that and then to be able to share that with others. Start by being able to share some of that with each other and then they were able to use that when they went to the capital and we specifically chose to come go to the capital at the time when no legislatures there and staff and aids were there and large amounts of staffers to talk about what was important to them and they were fairly well received and opportunity to follow up so since then we have had one person who’s been advocating very heavily for some changes in his own living situation with his apartment because it wasn’t satisfactory, so I think seeing some change as a result of that initial training, even though it was six hours it was life changing for some of those people. And historical information, current information and pictures, verbals, practice and people training will continue to be advocates. That’s all I need to say unless people have questions.
>> Jessica: Wonderful. Great for that. Wonderful how you adapted the training. Bob is next. Is that right? Bob, do you want to un mute yourself with *6?
>> Bob: Can you hear me now? Independent Living Center is living center in Fresno and advocacy kind of things and did protests and did marches and got in people’s faces and did in letters to groups and then go speak to groups and say really need to do this, this is what you should be doing, this is the right thing and we have all done those and as mentioned historically needed to do them and still need to do them. And always reacting, always behind when other people are making decisions we are then trying to deal with that. And we just had the idea what if people with disabilities were the people making the decisions instead of reacting to the decision. So when we looked at our community, we thought the best place to start was whole range of government councils and city, the county, the state, they all have 50, 100 kinds of councils that address every issue involved in community life. So we started the community leadership academy where we teach people with disabilities parliamentary procedures, board things, how to use issues they have in advocating for themselves as strength to use on a board and we teach open meeting and range of leadership skills both in general but more specific and group settings you would be and where we follow individuals and actually help them get appointments so governor’s appointment office in careful, even at times calls us and they have openings because and appreciate the training they do as well as local counties that contact us. This became so popular that an organization write associates that does national trainings with Richard Pemitel and Denise Basinet wanted to get together with us and we did that and designed leaders without limits and teach others to start. Orange County they have one. In January they will start one and two others in California and working with a guy in Utah right now who’s putting the information together to bring us out there and through mobility international USA and interacting with South Korea and going there in January to start the first community leadership academy there so for us it has been very effective. Not only starting to get people with disabilities in those leadership roles, but sort of the disability fells on fee kind of spreading and us as an organization and people with disabilities starting to be seen as community leaders rather than people seen with extra help, and we have been very pleased with all the results and get great feedback. We have a website nationalcla.org that gives more details about it and ultimate plan is to take over the Central Valley and have all the graduates and all the decision making boards throughout the area.
>> Jessica: Thank you, Bob. That’s exciting to hear and go all the way to South Korea to spread it there and we definitely want to give out the website for that and other speakers have other resources that we should put on our website for later please e mail me those or mention them on the call.
>> Bob: Let me just mention just one of the things we have done all of our training through grants so that we have never charged anybody to do it. We get grants to do all the training.
>> Jessica: Thank you. So now I will turn it over to Naomi Ortiz.
>> Naomi: Can you hear me?
>> Jessica: We can.
>> Naomi: Great. Thanks. Hello, everyone. My name is Naomi and looking at what we learn about disability history and culture, those of us on the call and I don’t think many of us at least I didn’t, have parents connected to disability history or community or culture and definitely didn’t learn it from my family, so a lot of us I think are first introduction to community to disability community happens through some kind of organization or group that shares an issue that we want help with or we want to change and get involved in the groups because we know we are angry and upset about something and also know the disability experience in society doesn’t quite feel right but don’t really know why and often didn’t feel like there’s the group to explore this question beyond or something was wrong. Work on something. Many of us common to do this work of teaching disability history and culture we have to start with ourselves and I don’t know if I would even been drawn to like that angle if I hasn’t had experience and able to teach a class on disability culture and the professor is working with put together curriculum and teach it and in a summer researching and reading all kinds of information and books about what disability experience is and what oppression is and what our oppression looks like in society. And for myself that was a profound shift because it was the first time that I had a chance to explore why. Why did I feel this way about being disabled in society, what history allowed me to have the experience I have had like for being able to even go to school, for example, and that information after teaching the class was to start talking to other people about it. I talked to my friends, family, everyone, so also way to engage in them and my experience and my identity. When I got involved in national self advocates, I found other young people have the same questions and central workweek put together and I know a couple people that have talked about disability history timeline and we also did the same activity where we printed out pictures and also included social history as well as disability rights history. We focus a lot on our rights and because often so much we are still fighting with those and there’s a lot to our community. There’s a lot of culture to our community. There’s disability humor and there’s disability art in theater and performance so we included some of that in the timeline, disability the disability pride parade, for example, and what we did was we had three people write down things from their lives from the disability history, felt proud of, something they have done, something they have been part of and had them add pieces to the timeline so that they could see how they were involved in the history that they were creating. This is where I was, this is where I am now. What do you think? Being able to engage in a place of honesty and I think this and it is part of sustainability in the group, disability culture because it takes people’s gut feeling and asks them to transform the feeling into understanding and that understanding completely shifts social identity so if we want movement of activist dedicated to change making, then must be willing to do our own work, own who we are and embrace the method of continual growth. Important to talk about how it is ally to each other, part of the community and part of the culture and, for example, one of the things I would do often when I went to meetings or conferences or whatever, you know, as I would advocate for accessible language and whoever was in the room, be able to understand what was going on, so even though that maybe has not been an accommodation I needed from myself but something that was happy to advocate for without needing to explain that and that was a way that I modeled other young people and people I worked with about how it means to be ally to each other. Need to practice those kinds of things too in terms of modeling what it means to be in community and really important and we need to document our history and losing a lot of stories right now of things that we are doing. Everything that we are doing in our community and our groups, this is part of the history and really put effort into documenting that because people need to know why they are part of creating it and helps them to be able to reflect on this is the history I am part of. Thanks.
>> Jessica: Thank you, Naomi. I love those ideas. Added some on FaceBook and hopefully other people will see them and start talking about them. Last speaker today is Josue Rodriguez. Go ahead. We can’t hear you yet, so hit *6 to un mute yourself.
>> Josue: Hello, everyone. I’ve with ADAPT youth summit and bring up leadership with disability rights movement. The way it is structured we give for a development within character of a person activist with a disability to be able to confront oppression and confront the stereotypes that people with disabilities. The way we structure the summit is that we make sure to include a diverse population of varied disabilities and when we take applications we learn about who we are with people with disabilities and what the roles are in the disability rights movement. We learn to take a stand and allow the young people to be able to identify with their anger and how to manage it to advocate for themselves. We have a 5 day 5 day training disability rights history and how ADAPT has influenced part of that disability rights history using directs action and activism. We help them learn about the history where we. In the past where we are now and where we want to be in the future. We talk about oppression and how people with disabilities have been oppressed and continue to be oppressed sometimes and help identify with anger and how to use the anger to advocate. Talk about different things. Talk about why direction action is important in the disability rights movement. For example, one of the major things that ADAPT helped create. We talked about how to identify problem with an issue and how strategies. Only purpose of the ADAPT youth summit is for people to be able to participate more and engage more with our ADAPT chapters and disability rights movement and what role they can play. We start off the weekend training by going through history and identify ourselves and what power we have and identify ourselves with power. One of the things we help within the disability I’m sorry. Can you hear me? Hello? Okay. I’m sorry. Okay.
>> Jessica: We can’t hear you now.
>> Josue: I don’t know what’s wrong with my phone. As I was saying, we have different activities to do with the youth to help them identify with anger and how to use the anger to advocate to be better with themselves and for others. We talk about the history of ADAPT and why ADAPT is an important part of the disability rights movement. Hello?
>> Jessica: We are here. We are listening.
>> Josue: I’m here. Sorry about that.
>> Jessica: If you want to go ahead and talk for another minute.
>> Josue: Within the ADAPT youth summit help with trackers and leadership skills to be able to help organize in their local chapters. We help them identify with the anger and use that as a way to did the advocate. One of the things that’s important is whole development and structure of our curriculum is intended to being able to identify yourself as person with a disability and oppression and identify ourself with individual with disability and how to use that power to advocate for yourself. We use approach to social change focusing on direct action and how taking direct action to advocate for change is important.
>> Jessica: Are you done?
>> Josue: I’m having trouble with my phone for some reason.
>> Jessica: That was a great introduction. Do you want to stop there and open up the dialogue? I’m going to take that as a yes because it sounds like he is a lot of phone problems and unfortunately thank you for that. We will go ahead and open it up for question and hour because we do sometimes have problems with static with background noise, if it works, I had go ahead and leave people muted but hit *6 if you have a question or comment and speakers should stay un muted so you can respond. So go ahead if somebody has a question or a comment.
>> Diane: I have been part of ADAPT for a long time too and in the early years when they first began doing these, the training program, in other words, I had opportunity to talk with one of the new groups and go through some of the process and one thing that I think is really excellent about what Josue has been doing and the whole effort has been including is actually building up during the training to deciding upon and carrying out all the elements of the direct action. Usually been targeting at least the ones I’m aware of like inaccessible restaurant where the training is held and go to all the steps of how to very practical level carry it out and and I think it would be really interesting to hear if that’s still happening and how it goes.
>> Josue: Yes, we are still having the ADAPT youth summit and we usually have it in July. We have an application process where we send out applications for people and one of the things that you mentioned, one of the major issues that we tried to address or organize around in the youth summit is target on accessibility and the way we do it is we allow to go through the whole process of an action from scouting to role playing using of hands on experiences to be able to develop the leadership and that potential leadership within them. We have different activities where we focus of the taking of power and identifying who really poss a power of change that you need and through the activities they come to term of figure out it is not always a person that has the power and it is not need to identify who really has the power to create the change needed and through the activities that we had, it is easier for them to be more comfortable in addressing some issues and identifying themselves as a person with a disability and that as a person with a disability they have power to be able to work as a team member with other people to create the changes needed in their communities. One of the things that I like to mention a lot is within my own experience and originally attended the youth summit and to me that created a huge impact within my advocacy and my involvement in the disability rights movement. When I attended the youth summit I really did not want to be apart of ADAPT. I didn’t agree on strategies. I’m going through the process of through the process of the training. I remember I was very hesitant to be participating in any of it and once we went to the target and how I saw the people having having the power to easily give us inaccessible subway restaurant and brought something out in me which I never thought I had. Ability to advocate for change. I remember feeling the knot in the back of the throat where you have the confrontation within yourself of oh my God, I’m so angry but I know I don’t want to be doing this type of action but yet you lose that fear of taking action because you know you realize and through the process of the training you realize that sometimes it is important to take that approach. It is important to use a different type of advocacy to be able to create the changes that you want. Through that I know for a fact now that it is successful training for people, my selves, like I said, I have been involved with ADAPT for several years now. Going through the training and really getting involved with the youth summit and with the national leadership and organizing some of the actions we have nationally and also some of our trainees that have gone through the summit, gone on and organized I have heard in the car earlier, some of the people that have gone through and actually part of this car and organizing around issues related to disability rights. So that’s why I believe it is important for young people to get involved to be able to identify themselves as that have power to be able to create the change and for more information you can visit our workplace account which is adaptyouthsummit.wordpress.com and I will be sending out YouTube video where we explain more about the ADAPT youth summit and how people can get involved and if you have any questions, you can also e mail me ADAPT youth summit at yahoo.com.
>> Jessica: Any other questions and comments? Questions and comments for each other, feel free.
>> Anne: When everyone was commenting on the different aspects of what they were working on, I noticed some very comments with support and best practices and seem to include things like performance of not just settling but anger they may have related to discrimination and history and we need to preserve the history and not let it die because that is a big part of helping people understand where we have been, where we are and where we are going. I thought that was an interesting piece that came out as a result of the discussion.
>> Jessica: Thank you for that. That’s really helpful.
>> Naomi: If I can make one comment, if that’s all right.
>> Jessica: Please.
>> Naomi: I wanted to make a comment about anger and I think it is interesting when we talk about a journey to become a community and anger is something that brings us together and really to become actually super important that people feel like there’s space to expressive anger and channel it which is why I think the ADAPT youth summit is really good and other ways that we allowed that to happen in the programs and day to day interaction and look at why and why are we angry and bigger and more critical pieces behind it and when I say that, it is like I think there’s a tendency to kind of get a little intimidated to get intimidated because a lot of stuff comes out of disability studies and it is not that accessible and I think there’s those of us within the community that can make translation and make things more accessible so I think looking at why is important piece and that’s the next step. Yes, anger is valid and here is why.
>> Jessica: Can you give an example of some of the things that come out of disability studies on that subject that you’re referring to?
>> Naomi: Sure. A really simple one and I think there’s definitely models kind of beyond the medical model social model and I think that the social model is a little bit limiting but the medical model tends to be a way of looking at disability and that is something that needs to be fixed and professionals have a say about our bodies and our minds, that kind of way of looking at disabilities that we experience on day to day basis, social model which is another step in looking at disability on something that’s parts of diversity and actual being is like normal to happen in society and part of who we are and our own expert to be disabled and what we need and I think and set us to hold people who say that there are allies, quote unquote, on behalf of the community and actually allies and how do we create a relationship with them where it is actually like ally relationship instead of them speaking for us. Those are pieces draw to models and real world experiences. The more we know about this stuff and interject it in the day to day things and yeah, this is how it relates to what you’re talking about, so that’s what I’m talking about, doing our own work is his really important. And I’m happy to send out books I would suggest on the listserv.
>> Jessica: That would be wonderful. Thank you. Time for a couple more questions. Remember to hit *6 to end mute yourselves.
>> Anne: History to getting to core of values and anger is important and that just really shows me that we can’t wait until we are in the middle of an advocacy campaign or need to get people involved to write letters in order to reach out and train them, has to be ongoing commitment of an organization or a community to do that constant work with kind of training that we were talking about earlier. I wanted to add that comment.
>> Jessica: You were talking about internalized oppression and believe the bad things that happen to us, can you say how you address that?
>> Speaker: Hard thing to realize and talk about and start with history and give people kind of like people see themselves in history if you see it and what people experience and taking those topics and arm and understand the concepts and then based on that we talk about rights and how we should deserve to be treated, which is also another conversation. People keep arms distance a way and then when you go into talking about oppression, talking about stereotypes and other thing we do, we use when we train we use people rely on them to give their real life experiences in that, and we tell them it is okay, you’re going to this is a hard thing to talk about and I usually model this is my own experience and that gives people the opportunity to feel comfortable telling their own experience too, and so they kind of take the concepts that we had been talking about and have a chance to relate to their own lives that they experienced now. So weave that into all things and history and dialogue and small group for people to process that from their own experiences too and I think that’s really really important thing to do if you can’t just talk about the topics, you would have to be able to relate feedback to the person.
>> Jessica: Great. Thank you. I’m going to take everyone off mute just in case there’s somebody that haven’t been able to ask a question. Hold on one moment.
>> Speaker: Other thing you have to be able to is challenge people and if we are doing disability rights, rights violation and someone will stay no it is not and you need to be able to challenge the person in productive way to think a little bit differently when they see this isn’t a violation and really is and I think that’s another part of the answer too.
>> Jessica: Was that Amanda?
>> Amanda: Yes.
>> Jessica: We are at the end of our hour. First, I want to thank the speakers, such excellent array of different tools and ideas thaw bring and with a lot of patterns and I’m glad an pointed out and there will be contact information for the website so take a look at that if you want to follow up with people and again urge people to put comments and thoughts and questions on the Yahoo group ListServ or on the FaceBook page so that we can continue this discussion. Obviously we could not fully finish this conversation in 1 hour and I want to thank our captioner as always. Our next call, don’t have the date in December in front of me, whatever the third Tuesday in December is, at the same time, and this isn’t yet confirmed but there’s a research project done by the national council on disability and national Disability Rights Network on the experience of voters with disabilities and 2012 election and they just released their report so we are hoping that we will be able to hear about that in December and then January we are going to start the year off with a call on intersectionality where they are talking about what does it mean, why is it important for us organizing in the disability community. And I think that covers it. Diane, did I miss anything again?
>> Diane: Sounds good. December 17th.
>> Jessica: Mark your calendars for that. Have a good Thanksgiving, everyone. Thank you for joining us. Hope to talk to you next month.
>> Diane: Thank you.
>> Jessica: Bye.
This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Real time Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.