PAULA MCELWEE: all right. Give us just a couple of minutes and lets wrap up some thinking here. We've looked at the notes that you had done before the last break so I'm going to be using those as the source of some of what I wanted to mention and connect some dots for you. If you have more comments, please be sure to leave them for us before you leave today so we can include those in the discussion about tomorrow because we want to continue to integrate everything into that tomorrow. The things that you need us to do. I want to remind, not the word I want. I want us to think together about the fact that this workshop is about moving from liberation to leadership. What you have been hearing today so far is the liberation piece. How do people become liberated? How do we know how we can make this happen. So we have been talking about strategies for liberation. And are we offering leadership opportunities to everybody in an equal and fair way, in a just way. One of the things that was up here earlier today, everybody is unique, essential and whole. And we say we believe that, but do we behave, this is time for self-examination for all of us, I think, do we behave in a way that really recognizes that. The work of justice is not complete until the most marginalized are full participants. And some of you may or may not agree with the, who that group of marginalized people are, but I can tell you right now you have marginalized people. There are marginalized people with disabilities who are not adequately connecting for whatever reason and it's true everywhere. In your community too, there's somebody who is marginalized. Maybe they are marginalized because they have a mental health lived experience and that mental health lived experience is considered less acceptable by your community than other disabilities. If you have this. I need a copy, I have yet to find it. I can't remember if it was in the Mouth or in the Rag. There was a cartoon called a hierarchy of disabilities, and it was one of those hierarchy triangles you know, or a list of disabilities like this. At the top of that list was good looking, 30sh paraplegic males who play basketball. They are the most accepted they get the movie roles. They are the ones that are acting. It went on down through the list how society treats different disabilities. And the reality is that some disabling conditions are more acceptable in our society than others. Whether we like that, of course we don't like it, whether we believe it or not, we need to give that some thought. Because, you know, we were talking today quite a bit about communities of color but that's not the only group of marginalized peoples. Sometimes it's people of a certain disability. Perhaps people with a developmental disability are considered marginalized in a lot of our communities. We are required to serve across disabilities. But I bet you, you don't. So we need to think about that. We need to think about the true belief that people are all a part of this community if they recognize that they have a disability. Now there's a bureaucratic term that shows up in your 704 report. I said I was not going to talk about regulations and stuff like that. It's unserved or under-served. You hear that phrase. That's kind of a patronizing tokenism. I don't like the term. But the reality is, you have had to identify some populations in your community that are not fully served. You do it every year. Whether you do it thoughtfully or not. We hope this conversation will bring you to a greater level of thoughtfulness around who is marginalized in your community. Because it's not always who you identified on your 704 report, and it is not always who the SILC identified, your statewide independent living council identified in their state plan. Sometimes we are not paying enough attention to all of the people there. You know, do we sometimes discount people who are discharging pain. I think more than anything about what you were saying Amina, I kept thinking, and the people who behave like that make us uncomfortable and we shuffle them off rather than inviting them in. We really need to stop and think about that. When people are noisy, angry, acting out, crying. Unable to hold it together in a meeting whatever it is that is going on is discharging that Amina has been describing makes us uncomfortable a lot of times. And when it makes us uncomfortable, we may be overlooking a great potential leader because Amina said this described her and look at this leader that is with us today. When you have somebody in your group of people in your disability community who is discharging pain, how do we help them to come past that into leadership? And that's the conversation that we are going to continue. This is not an easy conversation to have and I know a couple of you were expressing frustration because we have not gotten to the leadership yet. Believe me we are. Because right now, you are only identifying the superstars as potential leaders and people who seem to be the vocal ones and the superstars may not be the leaders that you need. It's really important to be willing to rethink that and to listen to what has been said with that in mind, who are the leaders you are overlooking. Because the leaders you heard from today came from this same place of oppression and shame and fear to lead. And some of those marginalized people who are our future leaders are ones that we have not always paid attention to. So it's important to take a look at that. It takes allies to affirm us and to move us into leadership. And I would like to ask you, consciously, to become such an ally because you can do that. You can be a part of this community in a way that is bigger than what you've thought about. And when we were looking at this content, we knew some of this would be a struggle. And we acknowledged that some of this is a lot to get your mind around and it's not comfortable and sometimes it's only intuitive after awhile. You some time with it, you need to sit with it. We hope that you will take the time to look at these ideas from that perspective. Is your CIL really changing lives? Because if you are aware of potential leaders and that they might not always be obvious to you, and you are supporting the development of those leaders, you are changing their futures in huge ways. And the futures of the people that they connect with in the community. So from that standpoint just wanted to kind of bring that around. Does that help connect the dots a little bit? I don't know? Okay. AUDIENCE MEMBER: I hear you that we need to look at the people that we may not always see leadership potential in. When is it okay to close that door and say that someone is too toxic and not ready to participate? I really struggle with that because I can identify one person in our center we had to say we cannot support you being with us until you make changes, but that's hard. PAULA MCELWEE: it's an ongoing assessment of the environment that you are going to be doing with your allies, with the peers. I think what Amina is going to talk about tomorrow will also come back around a little bit to how you actually implement this in your center. But it is true, all of those things that you saw sometimes are taken to the extreme in a way that is toxic for not just for the person exhibiting that, but also for everybody around them. You certainly want to think about it from this standpoint and try to bring them back around to say, "what is it that you are experiencing from here?" Where is this coming from? I think that if you have some skilled peers they can probably assist with that on a one to one basis so the toxicity doesn't spread in groups where they try to assume whatever it is they are doing. Assume power or hijack the meeting which is sometimes what you see. But that may be something that needs one-on-one to begin to happen. I don't know if any of the presenters or anybody else wants to speak to that. That's one thought anyway.