PAULA MCELWEE: So by the end of this training, we're our intent is that you would meet these specific objectives.

So that you would know how to create if you don't already have one or expand a CIL network for supporting disability liberation.

Listen to that phrase, supporting disability liberation.

That gives you a little hint of what's to come.

We also want to talk about how to broaden the scope of the IL definition of inclusion.

And why it's important.

So what is inclusion?

How do we as independent living advocates see inclusion, and why does that matter, that we have come to a consensus on that?

We're going to talk about some ways to facilitate leadership and leadership development because we want to offer ideas for how you can engage people in authentic leadership.

That's the word authentic leadership.

That is another hint of what's to come.

I think that you will really be excited by the way we are approaching this.

We are going to look at successful approaches for facilitating the consumer's movement from liberation to leadership.

And that means that we have to start with liberation, right?

Now, one thing I wanted to just mention is that we have not talked about liberation as much as we've talked about rights.

We have not as a field in general over the years, we have not talked about justice as much as we've talked about rights, and they all are part of the liberation of oppressed peoples.

So we need to have these conversations and share them with each other and we want to do that during the time that we have today.

As part of this, you're going to see some new maybe not new words, but maybe used in a slightly different way.

For example, disability justice, Stacey challenged me the first time I used the term.

I was still kind of figuring it out, and she said, "Well, what do you mean by that, exactly?"

And I think that's an important conversation to have.

What is justice?

You know, justice has been talked about kind of on the fringe.

Some of you who have been around in the movement for a while remember Justice For All, was the name of the organization after, well kind of after Justin Dart got kicked out of the federal government as an employee or resigned, decided he couldn't do what he needed to do there, and that organization was part of the ADA process.

But that phrase, justice for all, you'll see it in some of the old pictures that Tom Owen took of some of the different things that were going on as we began to work on some of the important things in our movement.

Justice is something more and something different than rights.

So justice is more action oriented than rights.

It means that all people are accepted, shared, you know, justly, and that rights are equally shared, distributed and applied.

So that's our definition.

You may want to go back to that a few times through these next few days to kind of frame this and think about what is the framework of this conversation?

We're going to talk about intersectionality.

I know, it's a big word.

And that means that there are issues that all people have and they intersect.

So their intersectionality is the bringing together of the issues of all peoples and recognizing that they are any group's struggle for acceptance, and it's the same as your struggle for each individual one of us as a struggle for acceptance, and all people experience that.

So we want to look at that.

And we're going to look about look at disability liberation.

That's the breaking free from oppression.

Some of that might be internal, some of that might be external but how do you break free from oppression as part of as part of this conversation?

So disability liberation.

And it often goes with the territory of having a disability.

So in our life experience as people with a disability, and some of us have other life experience all of us have other life experiences as well, but in those life experiences, oppression is one of the things that we sometimes don't talk about how to deal with that oppression internally as well as externally.

So we want to look at how do we do that both internally and externally.

You know, I think that this is an important conversation because as advocates, we don't have very many in-depth ways to approach the multitude of things that are oppressive that we see in our society.

So what is our main approach for advocacy?

It's anger.

And how healthy is that for us to only have anger in our toolbox?

And I don't know if you've noticed this, but one of the things that we sometimes do is we can't switch off the anger.

And so we get angry at each other when we ought to be working together.

And so you get this kind of negative thing rolling, and we need to back up and figure out where that's coming from and figure out what are some things we can do together to both internally and externally examine this issue of liberation.

So those are some opening thoughts.