PAULA MCELWEE: We don't have a lot of time too debrief on this activist thing, but wasn't it an interesting conversation at your table? I loved it and I've known the people at my table for a while and it was still really interesting to revisit, well, how did you start being an activist? What was your trigger or what were some of the events that got you going? So I really enjoyed that conversation. I hope you did, too. Lets circle back around a little bit and talk about these very key concepts that we mentioned in the beginning were the three new definitions. Remember that early in your presentation we had the definitions for what? Disability justice? Intersectionality? And then one we haven't dealt with yet, so we'll come back to that. But when we talk about disability justice and intersectionality, I think it's important to remember that there is an experience that informs your own personal definition of those terms. And everybody's in a different place. All of us have experiences around being treated in a way that was oppressive. Probably, for some of us, this can go way back to when we were children, right? For others it's part of your adulthood, but you mentioned, as you told your stories, some of those experiences, we have those experiences, and those inform how we see these issues. We don't all have to be in the same place at the same time. So I think it's important to know that, that we're all on our own journey, we're going to do it side by side with one another, and as much as we can as we do this side by side with one another, we want this to be useful, productive and helpful to the movement, to our communities, but we don't have to think identically about it. Does that help at all to kind of realize that, you know, this topic, we said this at the top but this is a great example of it. This topic is not exactly like any other topic. So when we do nursing home transition, you know, we talk to you about the rules and we give you sample policies and procedures and we give you sample forms and we say, well, these are the regulations around this and so forth. I am just so, it's so nice not to have to be doing regulations today. Because I do a lot of that, regulation, policy and procedure, job description, that kind of didactic pencil and paper stuff that you need to support your centers, but that's not the heart of who we are. So the heart of who we are, that's what we're talking about here, and we will not all be in the same moment as we do this but we are side by side in our journey. So I hope that's helpful for you and with that I will turn it over to our presenters for the next section. STACEY MILBERT: So before we get started, we wanted to address the two questions raised before, and I know at least I had a lot of discussion with people around them around is the ADA single issue or multi issue? And I think different people are going to have different answers, so we can look at it one way and say that the ADA has been single issue, or at least the way that it's been pushed for, but at the other side, the other side of things, like look at the idea of universal access or universal design. And Paula brought up the point that people didn't really have rolling luggage before 1990, and look at how many people benefit from that or people with strollers. Again, the bathroom issue. So there is so much there that we can look at in how people benefit from the ADA across identities and movements. Do people have any thoughts more about that conversation? Cool. And then the other question was around how to respond when somebody you are in movement with isn't accessible, and I was reflecting on that, and for me personally, movement building is relationship building, so if you feel like you have a relationship with someone, then that might increase, like, the depth of your conversation or the way that you talk to them. And then if you don't have a relationship with someone, maybe you take a different approach. So that's my only comments around that, around what to do if you're trying to be an ally to another movement and they do something that's inaccessible to you. Did people have other thoughts and comments that they wanted to share about that? Okay. So we'll just jump into the afternoon section. DOLORES TEJADA: cool. Okay. So just to briefly recap again, we discussed intersectionality and the limitations of just having a single issue politic, and like was mentioned before, when we talk about intersectionality, there's two ways of looking at it, and I think there's one that's on a personal level, the personal identity, and then that's really about where, how, where and how you view yourself and the different axises of identity that you have. So, and where they meet and how they, how they work in relationship with each other or not in relationship with each other. So that's on a personal level, and that's really about, you know, really self reflecting on our own about how your lived experience is informed by all these different facets of your identity. And then I think what we were kind of jumping into earlier when we were talking about single issue versus intersectional work is the bigger and larger systemic aspect of it, right? So there's the internal piece to tie back into the chart that, that Stacey was talking about earlier, the internal piece itself, identity, the interpersonal could be how you treat others and how others treat you, and the systemic level is the big piece, the work that we're doing and how, how what we are doing is informed by our own identities but also the work that we want to do in collaboration with each other, who that includes, and who that is reaching, and if everyone is at the table and if it's a shared goal. So does that make a little bit more sense to folks, too? Yeah? Cool. So the next thing we want to talk about more is really what is the justice framework? So we're going to get more deeply into that side of it. And also, we want to talk about the limits of nonprofits. So I know we're all from nonprofits, at least most of us are, and the need for movement building that is bigger. So we want to talk about what we have access to in nonprofits and what we don't and how we can do this work with what is in our capacity and what we have access to. And just how do we really incorporate that into the work that we're doing? STACEY MILBERT: okay. Cool. So a big issue that nonprofits often face is that we want to do advocacy work or activism, but we receive funding that doesn't allow us to do so, or even maybe the, if you're receiving funding from a foundation, maybe they don't support that view and so there's issues around if I do advocacy around this, I might jeopardize my funding, and that's so real, right? Like everybody faces that. A lot of scholars have studied this, and a book that is really helpful is The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, and it's by Insight Women of Color Against Violence, and Insight was doing a lot of work against violence, and what they found is when they took certain positions, they lost their funding from various foundations and they started talking about, okay, what are other ways that we can fund this work? And they also talked a lot about the way movements have been professionalized, so scholars have studied that in the '70s when populace movements, movements led by people were getting really into power, that's when the federal government created federal funding streams for nonprofits. Some people say that part of that was a way to kind of maybe take away some of the power from the movements because then the movement started getting a little bit distracted, so rather than like a whole group of people volunteering all their time to get something done, then people started creating nonprofits and then you are applying for funding, maintaining your 501C3 status, making sure that you have staff to do the work, where before people didn't get paid to do the work. So a lot of people have felt like, yeah, it's a distraction. So it's an interesting critique to think about in our work, especially locally. Like what are the, what is the work that you're not doing because of funding and what is a way that you could do that? So a lot of nonprofits, maybe they take on like fee for service contracts or they do independent fundraisers or they try to find other money so that they can still do the advocacy work that they want to that might not be supported. And that's especially important for independent living centers because the core of our money is state money, federal funding, so we don't want to be limited by the funds and do what we feel your community needs. So this slide says, some scholars say federal funding for nonprofits was created to temper populous movements. It met basic needs communities were organizing around. Movement leaders changed focus to creating nonprofits, creating an environment where people were focusing on competition instead of collaboration, and the work became a lot less radical. So deradicalizing. So how do we see this in disability and strength? And think independent living. We're here in Berkeley. Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: can I be heard? DOLORES TEJADA: name as well, please. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Doreen Jachpeeny. I'm president of the board of Community Resources for Independent Living, and, well, you know, I mean, Ed Roberts, you know, ended up going from being somebody who was developing the independent living movement and causing a lot of trouble to eventually running the Department of Rehabilitation. That's one example. STACEY MILBERT: thank you, yeah. Other folks? Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: well, this is Daniel and I agree that there is a whole lot of examples of how centers have to worry about funding and are unwilling to maybe push a governor to make a policy change that is not what he wants to, is not part of his program. So to challenge the management to let's say, we had a big fight in Pennsylvania with accessible transportation in rural counties, and there were a few centers that wanted to hold the governor to allow that changes, and they did that aggressively and there was a whole lot of people who felt that there might be fallout for that, that centers might be defunded or they might hurt other centers who weren't related or weren't doing that. So there was a centers versus centers attitude for a considerable amount of time saying there is no way you can do aggressive advocacy in that way and trying to disassociate or trying to reject those centers. And even today in Pennsylvania there are certain centers that are very socially active, and then there's certain centers who pretty much kind of keep to themselves and do their own thing and don't interact with other centers. And it's a very interesting dynamic, depending on, I mean, right across county lines, Allegheny County versus Boston County, you can have a very, very different mind set of centers and very, very different attitudes. STACEY MILBERT: definitely. Yes, the hand in the back. AUDIENCE MEMBER: Tori from Ohio, and I think in Ohio we see the same thing as what Daniel was saying, that a lot of CILs our way don't collaborate together as much as need be, so we're all competing for the same pot of money and we're all trying to get more so we can do more in the communities, but not just in the centers for independent living, also with all of the nonprofit arms that are disability specific we compete for funding. So like the Autism Society of the World, Muscular Dystrophy Association, all of those, we don't work hand and hand and not together to advocate and to come together so that that funding stream can come to all of us. We're all competing for the same pot of money and it needs to happen. STACEY MILBERT: thank you. And I guess to just add, so this isn't saying that we should go close all nonprofits and start, you know, radical movements, because nonprofits are obviously doing very important work. We are meeting basic needs, we're advancing rights, but this is saying that in addition to that, what is the work that we're not doing yet? And how could we support and foster that work to happen? Cool? Okay. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So is this on? There it is. Okay. And another thing to kind of add on to what Stacey was saying that Doreen kind of touched on, too, is that 35, 40 years ago when independent living was a concept and centers started to happen is that the goal was also to eventually not have to rely on federal funding, but was to be its own sustaining thing, and that's still a long-term goal that we haven't reached yet. And part of the reason that that was a goal was because of the capacity to be able to do radical work. And some of us, you know, it's like Stacey was saying as well, some of us are doing radical work in our own way and hopefully we can talk more about how to do that within the some of the boundaries that we are given because of funding but also to recognize that in a lot of ways we are still doing what is considered radical work. So I want to talk about disability justice, and we mentioned the terms a little bit earlier but I really wanted to, we're going to start talking about it more deeply. So disability justice is not a movement. It is not a thing and it's not a striving goal, but rather it's a, it is still a goal but it's more of a framework and a concept that people can apply to the work that we're doing and it's a vision of what communities can look like when they are accessible to everyone. So disability justice is also really important because it was started by queer people of color. It was, the initial conversations, again, while there's been concepts around it, it's really been formalized really only in the past maybe 10 years or so, maybe less than that, and it started with two queer women of color at the beginning stages, and then it expanded to include conversations with Leroy Moore who is right up here on the screen who is a black disabled or self-identified crip man, and then as well as Stacey, Eli Claire and a couple of others started to really frame what disability justice is about. So disability justice, again, moves kind of, we have the rights piece, we have, we've had disability rights movement, but it's kind of looking at, okay, what is the next step? And it's not a movement on its own but it's a framework to think about. So, and it's really about doing work with people that is led by people who are the most marginalized within the community. So again, queer people of color within disability is who should be at the forefront or should be leading what disability justice is all about. So I wanted to read this image, it's from Sins Invalid which is a collective of queer people of color, and a lot of the work around disability justice is coming out of Sins Invalid and they're actually based here in the bay area. So the image up here is a photo, it's a, this is actually a poster so that's how I kind of know it. But it's a poster with text at the top and Leroy Moore at the bottom. So I'm just going to read what the text says and it says, "All bodies are unique and essential. All bodies are whole. All bodies have strengths and needs that must be met. We are powerful not despite the complexities of our bodies but because of them. We move together with nobody left behind. This is disability justice." So disability justice has a couple different tenants. There is about ten tenants to disability justice that you can find online, but it's really about making the focus about who in the disability community are most marginalized, again, talking about the intersectional folks who experience marginalization on more than one axis of experience, of life experience. Do you want to add anything else? STACEY MILBERT: I think just one piece is so in disability justice, people started coming together to figure out what does this even mean? A big thing that was happening is disability rights folks and disability studies folks were saying that they were doing disability justice work, and it was all really confusing because there's differences between all of them, and it means something pretty concrete. And so a lot of times what happens in culture and movements is that words get co-opted by the dominant group and then the word ends up meaning something totally different. So a lot of people of color spent energy saying, please give us time to figure out what this means to us and please don't use that word. And so as you go home into your communities, that might be something to reflect on. For example, if you are a group of people who are mostly white, then maybe that's not disability justice. Like people of color need to lead disability justice. If you're a group of mostly men, if you're a group of mostly straight people, mostly middle class, all of those things, like we need allies and there's a role for everyone. So again, it's just about being conscious and supporting those who are most marginalized to be the leaders of disability justice. Does that make sense? Okay. So these next few slides are kind of intense because they're a bunch of charts, but to me, it's pretty helpful to think about what is the difference between a rights movement, services or justice. So with rights the main focus, the main goal is to get access to what the dominant group has. So that might be people with disabilities working to get rights to what people without disabilities have. It usually involves policy work and litigation and the key players are attorneys, policy makers and advocates. For example, we have the reproductive rights movement. And if you look at reproductive rights movement, the only thing that you will find is about a womans right to choose. Like, that is all the work that they do. And again it is focused on rights and the way that they do that is by policy and then litigation and most of the people involved are attorneys and policy-makers, folks like that. So that would be reproductive rights. Then you have services. Services focuses on meeting the basic needs to survive. And it usually involves nonprofits. And key players are service providers. It does not always include leadership of those receiving the services but we know at independent living it does. For example, reproductive rights isn't enough. If you have the right to choose whether to keep your baby or not but you don't have anywhere to go, then that right isn't very helpful to you. So reproductive services would be making sure that you have reproductive health care to exercise those rights. So they are both meeting a very important need. And then there's the third framework, which is justice. So the focus is on community organizing to shift power and it involves people most impacted by marginalization. So here that would mean reproductive justice. And reproductive justice if you look at the reproductive justice movement, it's all led by women of color and mostly low income and they do a lot of community organizing. For example, there was a campaign where this company was putting out all these billboards that said that they would give you money to have an abortion. And then what they recognized was who was being targeted by that campaign. Sounded a lot like eugenics so they did a lot of work around that. All kinds of different issues under reproductive justice. But again, all three are really important, but they are doing different work. We also have that with disability. Disability rights might focus on the passage of the ADA, Olmstead implementation, policy to keep benefits and work. Like, disability rights, that's a lifetime of work. We could spend generations just working on disability rights and we would be busy the whole time. It's so important , but at the same time, it is not everything. If we have all the rights, would we still be free? You know, like, what else is missing? So then there is also disability services and disability services is actually focusing on the basic needs of people with disabilities need to survive so that's more of the consumer directed services. Day programs. Fighting against budget cuts. All of the service providers with disability is a huge endless industry. That all falls under disability services. So again, rights without services doesn't get you very far because if you don't have the services to live in the community, then the rights aren't going to do you very much. And then the opposite, if you have the rights but don't have the services but don't have the rights, then you don't have a lot of choice or self-determination. And then disability justice. This slide says it is still a framework not yet movement, still in development. Another example is the same chart. Gay marriage equality, and anti-discrimination workplace laws for LGBT communities. So that definitely is a right, right. People want the right to get married. The right not to be discriminated at work. That doesn't give us everything so we also need services and justice. Under services that might include gender inclusive shelters. Youth programs, access to health care. And under justice that might include homeless youth who are LGBT taking over base. Creating communities of care. Something that's really important in LGBT community is the idea of chosen family. So if your family doesn't support you, you build relationships with other people. That definitely is justice work to me. The next part of slide says, civil rights for people of color. So that's right's based work. They might focus on voting access and anti-discrimination laws. So again we are noticing that everything in rights usually deals with policy, litigation, budget cuts, things like that, that's the rights based world. Services for people of color might be non profits. Corporate diversity programs, training programs. And then justice for people of color, racial justice might be Black Lives Matter, panthers liberation schools back in the day. Church organizing, things like that. And then, oh, this is a good example. So the difference between environmental rights and environmental justice. Environmental rights might focus on things like buy this kind of bag because it's better for the environment. Versus environmental justice might say, this community is totally impacted by this corporation's pollution and now all of these folks are acquiring illnesses and disabilities. That's environmental justice. Whereas environmental rights might focus on corporations doing better, things like that. So under that slide it says, campaigns to make corporations more environmentally responsible is rights and again that happens by policy and litigation. Services might be establishing recycling programs and environmental justice might be low income neighborhoods fighting against pollution and plant chemicals. Do folks have any comments or things they want to share? Daniel? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I do apologize for constantly raising my hand here, but it seems to me that rights seem to be very much there is a law that needs to be passed. A system that needs to be changed. It's very concrete. It's very, I, achievable. But it's structure. And services is kind of implementation of those rights. It's a tool to use to accomplish the rights and putting them in place in the community. But justice, disability justice seems a lot fuzzier. It's more concept than objective. Is that correct? STACEY MILBERN: totally. Yeah, totally. So that's the part where we want to say, like, disability justice that wasn't even a term 7 or 10 years ago. So a) things take time to really figure out what they mean. If you look up environmental justice, it's very clear what that means and there's a whole movement around it and the goals are very achievable and actionable. So I just feel like we are not there yet, but we are moving towards there, but the key values around disability justice, people with disabilities who are most marginalized are the ones leading the conversation. Any other comments? So one more slide. If we look at the feminist movement. Rights based feminists work look like working women. For example there's a lot of media right now addressing the pay gap and gender discrimination especially in the tech industry. And then services focuses on access to child care or women's leadership programs. And then justice might look like the women of color in leadership. So what we call the third wave of feminism for about the last 20 years. For seniors, rights might look like making sure that people have access to retirement benefits and Social Security. The big one is staying in community, combating elder abuse. Like you can do a lot of this through policy work and litigation. And then services would be making sure that seniors are able to meet their basic needs so that might focus on access to senior centers, meals on wheels, transportation to doctors appointments. Things that allow seniors to actually stay in the home. And then justice might be valuing seniors as elders and caring for them interdependency. So for example there's an organization in Detroit summer in Detroit and they do a lot of work around building community across generations. So they have a lot of potlucks, community gardens, things like that and a lot of it is around valuing seniors as elders. And then immigrant rights. So it might look like access to citizenship or education. Services might be training programs, benefits, jobs, education. And then justice would be activism against ICE raids. Deportation. Looking at how we ignore indigent history. Any comments? So is this starting to be a little bit more clear with the different examples? About what's the difference between rights, services and justice movements? AUDIENCE MEMBER: so this is like frying my brain. Which is good, it is why I came. It's really hard, it's really hard to let this in. It's interesting for me. And I just needed to go around at another reason why it is for disability justice that needs to be led by the most marginalized population. I don't see that in these other examples of justice and I don't oppose it, but I just need to understand it a little more. STACEY MILBERN: totally. The other examples. For example, with justice around the third wave of feminism, if you look at third wave of feminism that is all led by women of color. So that is where like Audrey Lorde, Barbara Smith, everyone, that's kind of that era body of work. Saying it is not enough to focus on feminism for white women but we need to make this relevant for everyone. And then around, let's see Reproductive justice is also led by low income women of color. And then, so for example, again, as a nonblack person I don't want to speak about Black Lives Matter but it's very different than a message around respect ability politics. Telling people to act a certain way, so that they can advance in society. Like it is more inclusive and says everybody deserves to not get killed by the cops. And then the example around environmental justice, like, that's people who are most marginalized doing the work. So that's like low income folks and communities experiencing environmental violence. They are the ones spearheading that work. DOLORES TEJADA: and it sometimes could be confusing, right. When we are working in coalition with each other sometimes especially if we carry certain privileges we are asked to do more of the labor in some circles so I think it's good to differentiate that. When we are talking about centering the most marginalized communities it does not mean putting the brunt of the work on those individuals. It means focusing on what their needs are because the most marginalized folks within any movement are going to be the ones with the most need. So until their needs and their rights and their services and their justice is met, then the work isn't really done. Does that make a little bit more sense? So that's why when we talk about especially in disability justice we have rights and services and we have all thinks things, but as we know, we still have under served populations. So if we are going to look at it from the IL perspective, we have under served populations that are identified for a reason and that is because they are communities that are not being met and there's a huge gap. Until those under served populations are having their basic needs met, then we can move towards a more just society. So when we talk about justice as well, what I am seeing is that because it is a framework and maybe now since it is so early in disability justice we don't have those measurable goals like we do with rights and services where they can track data or we can count successes in policy. But what justice looks like, especially when we talk about seniors, it looks like switching our way of thinking or our way of understanding various populations. So for example, in America here we have a certain value system when we talk about elders. That is a cultural thing. While there is folks who are from other cultures who are, who may be of different races who culturally value elders in a different way. In America here we have a system set up where we may not be able to do that on a certain level. So switching, the justice piece of it would be how do we switch the conversation from having seniors be seen as disposable and oftentimes people with disabilities are seen as disposable to where we could switch it to the justice piece of it where we value what they have to bring to the table. We value them as elders and we value that they have a historical context that we can have access to to continue this work. That to me is a lot of what disability justice is. It's a perspective of looking at things where every single perspective is valuable and where the person that has the most needs, has their most needs met or else the work is not complete yet. There is still more to do. STACEY MILBERN: there is sometimes conversations around movement building where the argument is, "let's put the person who can be most successful. Let's let that person be the front runner and they can go and open up doors for all kinds of people. So maybe let's pick a person with a disability, who is most employable, has the most social skills and we give them disability support and they can go out into the world and then allow everyone else to follow behind. That's one way of movement building. But another way is to flip it over, like Dolores said and let's say the opposite. Let's take the person with the most significant challenges and create an environment where they are fully participating. And once you figure that out then the world is much bigger for all of us. So it's a different approach. If we can figure out a world where Ed Roberts who is living in an iron lung is the department of rehab director then that's a much broader imagination versus maybe somebody who might have already been able to succeed because of their other privileges going forward. Does that make sense? Okay? DOLORES TEJADA: okay. Is it me? STACEY MILBERN: so we wanted to talk a little bit about empowerment. And again this is empowerment on the personal and collective levels. So earlier we talked about the internalized level, the interpersonal and the systemic and that's often a good place to start around let's support people to be personally empowered and then from that feel empowered to lead their communities. And here we are talking about empowerment as building skills, techniques and capacities of an individual and groups to enable moving towards goals. So I knew you guys talked a little bit about that it at lunch. Any stories that you want to share about when you felt empowered? Okay. So how is empowerment a direct push back or response to ableism, racism, sexism? One second, Daniel. Let's see if anyone else. Okay. Someone at the back table. AUDIENCE MEMBER: okay. Dirty work, but someone has got to do it. Putting people with disabilities, putting people of color and putting women in positions of power is a direct push back to ableism, racism and sexism. STACEY MILBERN: yes. DOLORES TEJADA: Arturo AUDIENCE MEMBER: one thing we practice at our center, excuse me, is having people, the staff, people with physical disabilities participate at boards and commissions. We do have one staff member who is on the county commission on disability. He attends the meetings. They follow the agenda, nothing really happens. But since he is there now, now we can use his influence to do something. I think having people at the forefront do the work. STACEY MILBERN: totally. And people who are most marginalized are the ones that have the voice and the position to speak out, then they will be able to speak around a lot of things that other people might not. So that is great. We are going to talk about that more tomorrow, around how to foster that. And we wanted to mention, how is it not? Sometimes empowerment programs focus just on growing the individual as a leader. And again that's not enough. We need to also talk about collective empowerment. So how are we empowering communities to have self-determination over what they need and want? Okay. So is all empowerment the same? Consumer direction allows for individuals to name that have strengths and where they want support. Empowerment also breaks down into personal, interpersonal and systemic. Again, it must be individual and collective. Do CILs address each of these the individual and collective. Is there CIL out there who is doing collective empowerment? So empowering the disability community at large or is it mostly one-on-one or how are people doing this work? Yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm not sure if this is directly what you are asking but I'm going to give it a shot. I recently did a job seeking skills and employment skills classes to an empowerment center that dealt strictly with people recovering from drug and alcohol abuse and had been incarcerated. So would that be a selective group. STACEY MILBERN: it sounds collective to me. People leading themselves. AUDIENCE MEMBER: people leading themselves but they all have a similar quote- unquote disability. STACEY MILBERN: yeah, definitely. AUDIENCE MEMBER: So that's community. STACEY MILBERN: yes, and they sound empowered from here. [Laughter] AUDIENCE MEMBER: I don't know. I'm confused. So okay. Thank you. STACEY MILBERN: Michael AUDIENCE MEMBER: well, at CRIL I know there's four different ways I can think of immediately, the Dan and Danny, and then we have a Hispanic group that meets also and then we've done the community leadership academy, and the goal of all four of those groups is how to enable people with disabilities to express their gifts in such a way that they're able to sit at the table and help in making those decisions that affect our community. STACEY MILBERT: totally. And just to say, like, shout out to CRIL because they are one of the few independent living centers in the county that I see that staff is like a huge percent people of color, serving consumers of all backgrounds and doing really important work, and we need more where the staff is reflective of the community it serves. So yes? AUDIENCE MEMBER: hello. Can you hear me? STACEY MILBERT: yeah. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I'm Matt. I know at our CIL we have a transportation meeting where we invite all of our consumers. We live in a very rural area where transportation is a big issue, so we invite all of our consumers to come in and talk about the issues that they have with transportation, good and bad, and we also invite our local transit units in to listen to their comments and their concerns and they make changes accordingly as the consumers give them their issues. STACEY MILBERT: cool. Awesome. AUDIENCE MEMBER: we also had an ADAPT chapter that we are really trying to build to get people in to know how to, I mean, that's it, to empower themselves and give themselves a voice rather than having other people make decisions for them, they need to speak up and let everybody know the issues at hand. STACEY MILBERT: that's a great example. Do folks have any non-disability examples? AUDIENCE MEMBER: I kind of do. In the sunset we have a community connections program, so we go out into the community to establish summer camp programs or establish programs in the community, and we staff a staff person in those programs to help them become inclusive so that individuals with disabilities feel welcome in those programming whenever they walk in the door, then they have access to whatever the program is. And then what we do is we train staff in those programs so that they can include them. So they're non-disability specific programs that are inclusive. STACEY MILBERT: cool. I think one non-disability example I might offer, here's a new school in East Oakland, and I love their motto. So a lot of schools teach young people if you want to be successful, focus, stay out of trouble, go to college and do your thing, but this school is a little bit unique where they say do all of those things but you're a part of a community. When you go to college, come back or stay here and contribute towards making East Oakland a vibrant community. And I love that because it's from kindergarten they're teaching young people that you're responsible for your community, and it's not something that you can leave. One other example comes to mind. When I was like 19 years old, my friends and I started this youth collective and it was focused on disability and we were mostly people of color, and it's a kind of scenario where, like, there's two or three queer people but everybody's kind of exploring their identity, and then soon like half of the group is queer. But so we called ourselves Disabled Young People's Collective, and that got a lot of push back because, a, people don't like the word disabled, so we were saying, "No, for us it's a political identity. We're proud of that word." But all of our funders really believed in person first language, so we lost a lot of the money that we had initially, and we started having to figure out how are we going to do the work that we wanted to do? Because at the time we were doing, like we wrote disability history legislation, we were doing schools, all kinds of stuff. So because most of us are people of color, and again clearly we started doing work within those movements and we were able to get support within through those communities. So even though we all had disabilities and we were the Disabled Young People's Collective, it wasn't actually located within disability rights which is pretty interesting. So leadership, traditionally, leadership means a charismatic individual on stage. So we think of leadership as, like, the person with the microphone, but actually, leadership is way bigger than that. We need to also think about everybody who contributes as a leader, so people who do work behind the scenes, for example, women, they're often invisibilized but they're contributing to the event just as much as the person on stage. So we can see the way that disability, race and gender, how that really shapes who we think of as leaders and who we don't. So, for example, if leadership means having the best voice and the best choice of words, that might be pretty ableist, right? Like that's not going to include a lot of people. If leadership means being really assertive and not caring what other people say and just talking over people, that might be really shaped by gender. You know, there's all these different kind of things. If people of color are being told that to be polite, you need to let white people speak, then that's totally shaping what we think of as leaders. And then use of anger, and oftentimes anger is pretty racialized and tone is policed, so there might be a situation where a white person is saying the same thing that a person of color just said five minutes ago and people think it's an amazing idea when someone had just said it, or somebody might say, "hey, we need to to this," and then everybody's like, "oh, the way you said it is too harsh." But in any other situation, anger is fine. So oftentimes like tone, policing people's tone when they have a right to be angry can also be racism. Does that make sense? Ability and needs that don't fit in a box. So ability can definitely shape leadership for the reasons I named. If you need more time to process, if you think a different way, if you have different axis needs that doesn't prevent leadership. It just means we need to come up with more inclusive models for what leadership means. And then age, so sometimes young people are kind of patronized. But you don't have to have years of experience to have some kind of wisdom. And on the flip side, ageism, people reach a certain age and their voices are dismissed and that's still very important to have. So what about this: do people have thoughts around leadership? Yes. AUDIENCE MEMBER: one of the things that I don't see as having been voiced here yet today, as a person who was born with my disability and grew up quite a while ago, so I'm one of those, my voice is becoming less relevant, but I think that a lot of us who are in that 40 to 50 range were taught to squelch our leadership potential because you are dependent upon other people, and that means that you need to shut up and be nice. And I think that there needs to be more of a focus on developing leadership potential in young people but also in people of my age bracket who weren't given those opportunities as younger professionals or as younger advocates. DOLORES TEJADA: I hear that. And I think also if I could tie it back into disability justice as well. We'll all here as a part of independent living centers, right? Or center for independent living depending on what side of the country you're on, it switches up, ILC or CIL. But I think one of the ways that disability justice ties into that and it is a newish concept is the concept of interdependence which is again going back to the idea that everyone is valuable and has something to contribute, is that we don't place this kind of hierarchal method on what people are capable of doing and placing people's access needs as some way being, marking them as less than or not capable of. So if someone, changing our perspective from, and it takes time for sure and it is a challenge, but changing our perspective from the assumption that someone who needs certain access like a caretaker or an attendant is somehow not able to contribute as much because that assumption is really false, and the concept of interdependence is really about relying on each other for, so I may have a different need than somebody else, but that we can each utilize each other's strengths to get our needs met. And so, so I think that's something that's really important and that I kind of heard you saying as well and I think that's really important. STACEY MILBERT: Jeff AUDIENCE MEMBER: something that strikes me is that there looks like there might be different styles, also in addition to what's up on the slide. There might be different styles of leadership that best fit if you're looking for rights, if you're looking for services and if you're looking for justice. I notice it in myself that it seems like the leadership started fighting for disability rights, and there's a certain particular '60s- esk style to that though it happened in the '80s, and now that they're in positions of authority and power in the CIL and have gotten some rights, they are working on services and it's a different type of leadership style. And since I think a lot of youth disability rights people I've met recently are very much, since they are post ADA, coming to their adulthood in the post ADA world, they're kind of in the services and justice realm, moving more towards justice now because the services are almost assumed, depending upon where you live. So I think it's kind of interesting and I think that's something to take into account. What are you, what are we looking for in a particular, for whatever particular task needs leadership on? STACEY MILBERT: totally. There's a role for everyone. There's so much work we have to do so there's definitely a role for everyone to play. DOLORES TEJADA: and if I could really quickly add to this leadership slide, too, something that it reminded me of that I would like to share is that especially when we talk about traditional leadership and we look at disability history and what stories are shared in disability history, so not, so not just now teaching each other or sharing history with other folks, but even when we're sharing history among ourselves, I can remember a couple of years ago there was a screening for a documentary and the documentary was very hyped up and people were very into it, and when I watched it, the majority of the documentary focused on a lot of the same people that we hear reiterated who did do very good work but whose stories we may have heard in some capacity, folks like Ed Roberts and Justin Dart, and the thing that was most alarming to me is that in this documentary there was really strong leaders who were women who played a major role. I'm pretty sure Judy Huemann was in there talking, and there was other really strong women talking, but as opposed to asking these women to share their story, the women were asked to share the history of the men. And so across cultures I kind of see where women become the story tellers as opposed to the ones who are able to say what their contributions were. So that's something that I can, a good example of leadership if we're going to talk about disability history is being able to cover the fact that women were in leadership positions and were doing really great work as well. So it's definitely been there but it's about really sharing the stories with each other and finding those stories. STACEY MILBERT: yeah, I was reflecting on my own personal experience, because when I started doing youth organizing, we would organize like these week-long youth events, and I would be behind the scenes writing the grants and doing all the prep, and then my friend who had a different disability, a learning disability and he was white and he was a guy, he would come in like the same day and he would be the mc, and he didn't do any of the, you know, months of prep work, but when the event ended, everybody would give him props and then he would be the one to get the cool internships and the cool jobs and it was like, oh, man, I'm not going to do this anymore because that's such a leadership model that I don't ascribe to, and you need to think of everybody that contributed towards making that event happen. So not invisiblizing people's labor. Okay. Cool. One last slide. So we talked about this earlier, but reflecting on how funding affects our movement, capacity, in services, who can be served, program types how many people can be served? Who have CILs left out because of the way they were structured? So even here, who are the people that are not in the room? We can reflect on that and think about why that is and what kind of access and privilege it might take to fly across the country and have your job be able to support you and, you know, be able to be away from your family for three days and get attendant care, whatever you need out here? A lot of that is really shaped by access and privilege. And then naming the difference of disability rights and justice. So I think we're out of time.