-Good evening, everyone.
Welcome to MOHAI.
My name is Rachel Spence,
and I am the public programs manager here.
For low or no vision audience members,
I'm a white woman with red hair in a ponytail,
wearing a black dress with daisies on it
and a black cardigan.
Thank you so much for coming out on what we know
is a very rainy and traffic-filled evening.
And thank you to those of you
who end up joining us through live stream,
or are going to watch this in the future
on our YouTube channel.
Tonight, Seattle Disability Activism History is
a partnership between MOHAI
and the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods.
As an important welcome into the space,
we encourage you to take care of your needs during the program.
The bathrooms are down that hallway and on the left
and there is a bar in the back,
which some of you may have found that has drinks
and snacks for purchases.
Please feel free to get up and move
if you need to during the program.
And there's also space
to stand if you would rather stand in the back.
As we ground into the space,
it's important to acknowledge that here at MOHAI,
we are on the historic and contemporary lands and waters
of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Muckleshoot,
and all Coast Salish people.
Historically native communities were forcibly removed
from the city,
but today we honor their continued endurance
with deep respect and gratitude
for the stewardship of this place.
And now I am going to turn the mic over
to our amazing partners
at the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods.
More specifically, Michael de Lange,
who is a neurodivergent historian and city planner
who has worked for the state,
has historic preservation offices in Hawaii and Oregon
before coming to Seattle and the Department of Neighborhoods.
So let's give a round of applause.
[ Applause ]
-Hello, everyone. Thank you for the introduction.
So I'm a short brown guy with a little bit of gray in his beard
and a blue corduroy suit with a plaid shirt on.
And I'll describe our first slide here.
It says Seattle Disability Activism History.
And it has MOHAI's logo,
and then the logo of the department that I work for,
the Department of Neighborhoods.
And then there's an image from MOHAI's collection
of folks in mobility devices picketing in front of Metro,
the transportation provider.
And the sign says, "Save our bus, Center Park."
Remember that name, Center Park, will come up again.
That's right. I have to do it this way.
There we go. Okay.
I always like to do a little roadmap, and set expectations.
I get fidgety if I'm sitting in a presentation
and I don't know what's going to happen.
So I like to do that for audiences.
So what I'm going to talk about --
I'm going to talk about my department
in a disability history report that we won a grant to write.
And then I'm going to show you some of the people
that worked on the project for us.
And I'm going to share some of the places and people
that we learned about in the research that we were doing.
It's going to be very, very cursory.
It's going to be just quick hits.
But hopefully,
it'll be enough to entice you to look at the document.
And then I'll also offer some resources
that are accessible if you are interested
in doing your own research.
And then I'll, for very briefly, talk about what might come next.
And then I'll introduce a panel of folks
that helped us with the project.
The folks that are sitting here,
you'll finally get to find out who they are.
But until then, sit with the mystery.
Okay.
So I work for the Department of Neighborhoods,
but I work specifically in the Historic Preservation Program.
And our mandate is preserving and perpetuating --
there were some other adjectives I'm not sure what it is,
the heritage and history of the city.
And the way that we do that is through Landmark Program.
If you've heard of Seattle Landmarks,
we have more than 400. And in this slide,
there's some -- it's a historic preservation program,
and then there's some dead space.
And that is because I can never come up with a single image
that really encapsulates the entire program
and all of the work that we do.
You've probably heard of the Space Needle.
That's a landmark.
You can imagine the Space Needle there.
The building that we're in right now it was a naval facility.
This is a landmark.
Some of the ships outside are landmarks.
There's bridges and steam plants.
Our goal is to tell the entire history
of the city through places. It's not just single sites.
We also do that through historic districts.
We manage eight historic districts.
The most famous is probably Pike Place Market.
You can imagine Pike Place Market in that empty space.
But also, Ballard, the International District,
Columbia City, and several others.
And we have a survey which has thousands of properties;
a little bit of information on properties throughout the city.
We use that for our work and determining if,
you know,
a development project might be impacting a historic place.
But we share that with the public.
And soon we will have very exciting news about our effort
to make that much more accessible and interesting.
I'll talk a little bit about that at the end.
The program has existed for 60 years.
I haven't worked there for 60 years,
but we're very proud of the work that we've done.
It was one of the first historic preservation
programs in the country.
But like all institutions the work in our past
was really focused on dominant history and dominant cultures.
People who had money and means to compel us to,
you know, make landmarks.
I think when people think of a sort of stereotype
of what a landmark is, they often think of like,
you know, some rich guy's house.
And from all the examples that I talked about before,
we know that's not all we talk about.
But that reputation in the field is not completely undeserved.
In the last few decades,
thankfully, there's been a lot of organizing,
particularly in communities of color,
to get properties listed
on the National Register of Historic Places
or as local landmarks.
There's been a lot of, in the last decade and a half,
organizing within the LGBTQ community
toward projects like ours
and listing on the National Register.
We're very serious about being a partner
and being proactive in our work to make sure
that the work that we do is inclusive, you know?
Our mandate is to perpetuate and preserve and share
and honor the history of the whole city.
And so in thinking about how to do that,
we thought about -- I'll move my slide --
4Culture actually made things somewhat easy for us;
4Culture, the culture and arts
organization that is at the county.
They, in the last 10 years,
done reports about what's missing
within historic preservation,
where the gaps are in landmarks and with the National Register
and in approaches.
And one of the takeaways from that
was that there were no landmarks that had anything
to do with disability history,
at least not as their primary reason
for being listed as a landmark.
So 400-plus landmarks,
none of them had to do with disability history.
That's not rare in other cities, and in the national program,
the National Register of Historic Places.
And so we thought,
"Let's be proactive and do a grant project
that works in the least served community,"
so that we can maybe get the ball rolling
on bigger things later.
Starting a model or creating a model for other cities to use,
the grant that we want to do this project is a grant
that's really accessible for small communities
and any communities
that are doing historic preservation work.
There's also work at the national level that's being done
that's sort of in its beginning phases.
And we're hoping that completing a project,
making the mistakes that a first project makes,
we could offer up some roadmap for that project.
We decided specifically within disability history
to focus on activism because the touches
that historic preservation as a field
has had with disability history have mostly been places
that were, you know -- that folks were working with
because of the architecture of the place,
and not because of the people
that were there at least primarily.
And often those were places that people were sent to.
We wanted to focus on activism
because it put the focus on the community's agency
to affect change.
And so that was our starting place for the work
and the research that we did.
And I think we went a little beyond just, you know,
the immediate things that you think of as activism,
to organizing.
But I think it was useful to have that as a starting point.
So -- and I want to go back to the slide.
I like to share this image that is on this slide,
it is a parchment paper. You can tell it's old timey
because it's got kind of curly-q handwriting.
It's very difficult to read, but it says,
"To the honorable City Council."
And this is a petition from Mr., I think, J. S. Light
who in -- I won't use the terms that they used then,
as a person that had a disability
and whose community was petitioning
to allow him to sell things.
I like to include this just because it says something,
and I think everyone in this room knows is that as long
as there's been a Seattle,
there have been people living and working,
creating lives, and history in this city that had disabilities.
So the report that we did where we got the grant to write,
it's called a historic context study.
And I'll do a description here of the slide.
There's an image that is not necessarily relevant
to historic context study.
I just really love this image.
I think it's a really beautiful image.
It's one of MOHAI's.
It's of a woman standing in a printed dress
looking out the window,
or standing in front of the window with light coming in.
It's from a sheltered workshop
that our organization put together for the employment
of folks with low vision and who are blind.
But really that photo always kind of captured my imagination.
So I wanted to put it in.
You can see the brooms that are made in the factory.
So, historic context study;
it's just a written history really, basically.
And it makes it easier to understand what's significant
about a place or an event or a person
that is a part of a history.
It is specifically geared
toward the National Register of Historic Places.
That's how we were able to get the grant.
And that's the kind of like system that it works within,
but it's not its only use.
It is really focused on place-based history.
That is kind of a limiting factor in what's written.
But it's also useful as sort of a general organizing document.
So if you're writing a National Register nomination for a site,
you'll have a little bit of contextual information about
how that site might fit into a history.
Whether it's in the report
or whether the reason that that thing is significant
is detailed in the report.
It doesn't designate any given properties.
It has no kind of legal standing.
And it's not definitive history. And I feel like that's something
I really want to underline
is this isn't the last word in history.
We're not projecting at that.
I'm hoping that it's the beginning of a conversation.
But that historic context study model is just something
that we had to do, well, to get the grant working
with the National Register System.
So I moved on to the next slide here.
We have three images of three folks.
I did not write this, I wrote little bits of it.
We hired three historians. And on the right,
there is a photo of a woman with a lovely smile and blonde hair.
That's Laura Leppink.
She was with the University of Minnesota
and is part of a collective that is one of the few groups
that's doing work with disability history
and historic preservation at that intersection.
She's a public historian.
She's written National Register nominations about the person
on the next slide, just as a preview.
And as well as many others in the center,
there's older --
Gail is going to kill me for calling her older.
Older than Laura woman with head wrap on and glasses.
That's Dr. Gail Dubrow.
She is a professor at University of Minnesota,
but she has a long history here in Seattle.
She was head of the Historic Preservation Program
at the University of Washington for years,
and has a well-deserved reputation as someone
who has spent the last few decades trying
to really expand definitions of what fit into our field,
writing feminist histories and histories of people of color.
And has just started, in the last few years,
doing work in this space at the intersection of disability
and historic preservation.
The last person is a person with a little smirk
and a plaid shirt and a kind of swooped hair.
That's Morgan LaCasse.
Morgan is, I think, very busy right now.
They're the graphic designer for the report.
We just got our final text finished today,
and it's sent off to Morgan.
And Morgan is going to make sure that it is beautiful
and accessible and get all of the images
and everything formatted so we can share it with you.
So I talked about the report.
What did we find? It's 200 pages.
So in the couple of minutes that I have,
it's going to be very difficult to go into a lot of great depth.
So I organized this around firsts.
This is the first historic context study
any community has ever done about disability history.
And so I thought I'd pull out some firsts.
Firsts aren't the most important thing in history.
They're not the only thing that's important,
but, you know, they're eye-catching.
So our first first is this gentleman.
I've switched slides.
And there's an image of a -- black and white image
from the 19th century of a gentleman with a white tie on
and a kind of walrus mustache and little glasses.
And that is Olof Hanson.
Olof Hanson was the first licensed deaf architect
in America and worked here in Seattle.
He got his start in Minnesota,
which was a happy accident since we hired people from Minnesota.
And started his career there and came out to work at a firm here
and eventually had a job with UDub.
His house in the U-district
was a kind of a natural organizing space.
He actually had a few different houses and offices
for deaf advocacy groups,
but also, you know, social things, weddings.
Part of how I know that is, skipping down, his wife Agatha.
And he founded a newspaper for the deaf community in Seattle,
or the deaf community in the Northwest
actually called the Northwest Observer.
And it was published throughout the early 1900s
and is online and accessible.
So if you want to learn more about deaf history in Seattle,
specifically at that time, this is amazing resource
that Gallaudet University has made available.
It's another place that he worked.
He was also an early force in the Puget Sound Association
for the Deaf, PSAD. It was an organization
that started with advocacy around employment access
and branched out to many different things
and was unique at the time, at the turn of the century,
because it was organized by people from the community
for their own needs.
I think the image of the woman at the sheltered workhouse;
that's more representative of the type of the organizations
that were doing care that were sort of on their charity model.
So on the topic of the organizing for the community,
next topic before we get to our next first.
This is Ida Daly.
There is a black and white image of a woman in a mobility device.
A chair, a powered chair. She's wearing a pantsuit.
You know it's the '50s because she's got cat eye glasses on,
and a beautiful little brooch.
There may be people in this room that have worked with Ida Daly.
I seem to run into people who remember her everywhere I go.
She did a lot.
She was a nationally and internationally recognized
figure in disability advocacy.
She founded the Handicap Center in 1951
and was really focused on creating organizations
that were funded by the community
for the community's needs.
And the leadership in the organization
was from the community.
By complete happenstance, UDub actually didn't even know this,
they have all of the newsletters of that organization
in special collections.
That's where I got this image from.
And it's an amazing resource
to really get into the day-to-day of people
that were associated with the Handicap Center
from weddings and birthday parties,
but also the issues of the time.
And there was one issue that came up over and over
and over for the first decade of the existence of the group.
And that was the need for accessible housing
as a kind of foundational and primary need
for people in the community.
And I switched slides. So there's two images.
The one on the left is a huge sign.
It's a black and white image.
It says,
"Future site of Center Park Apartments for the Handicapped."
And then under it, there's three folks.
On the left is Ida and the other two gentlemen
were with the Handicapped Center.
It feels a little flipped
to just kind of go through all of this advocacy so quickly.
There was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears
put into advocating at the local, state and,
national level to create a housing project,
which is the photo on the right.
There's an image,
hand drawn image, an architectural drawing,
of a building that still exists.
Center Park, which is down in South Seattle.
I've switched slides.
There's an image on the left of a Brutalist building with brick
and projecting concrete balconies and voids and mass.
You can tell I'm an architectural historian.
And a big concrete plinth out in front.
Central Park was the first public housing project
in America that was specifically designed for people
with disabilities.
And I think, further important, it was designed by Paul Kirk,
who is an architect of some renown in the area.
And as a modernist, I love Kirk's work.
But Kirk had polio as a child
and had mobility issues his entire life.
He's actually known and for including
ramps in a lot of his public buildings
as much for architecture as accessibility.
And I think you know that as a concern.
So that experience and those sensitivities,
I'm sure is why they brought him in.
He actually designed the original
Handicap Center headquarters. So in Central Park,
there's a building that was designed by a person
with disabilities
because of the advocacy of people with disabilities
for people from the community. And as an accessible building,
it became a natural meeting place for the community.
And in doing the research of all the various organizations
that had existed,
there ends up being kind of a node around Center Park,
which I think makes sense.
So I've switched slides.
Gail and Laura did a lot of research
on the intersections between the disability organizing
and advocacy community in the mid-century,
like the last century LGBTQ organizing.
And then later organizing with HIV/AIDS --
people suffering from HIV/AIDS and the people
that cared about them.
There's a lot of overlap.
It's like one of the more interesting chapters.
And it leads to one of our other first,
which is Bailey-Boushay House.
Which, again, I don't feel great
about going through this history very quickly.
But it is detailed even more in the report.
And there are really amazing videos
that Virginia Mason put up on their YouTube in 2014
or so that really go into detail
about how the community had to fight the neighborhood
and the medical establishment
to create this place to provide compassionate
and care that was geared toward people with HIV/AIDS.
So yeah.
If you're online, you can open up a browser tab and go,
you watch the rest of this.
There was another organization, POCAAN,
which was really amazing, People of Color Against AIDS Network,
which is a kind of consortium of various advocacy groups.
As another amazing history,
MOHAI actually did a panel about their history.
So I won't go into that much detail.
You can check that out.
And they also have an entire subsection within the report.
So I have one more slide after this,
but I just wanted to say thank you.
In this slide, there's a image of folks square dancing
in wheelchairs from the Handicap Center from the 1950s.
I love this photo because it's people enjoying themselves.
If you're interested in reading the report,
we just got the final text.
You can Google Seattle Disability History,
and it should be the first thing that comes up
if this event isn't the first step
or you can find it on Disability History or the --
I'm sorry, the Department of Neighborhood's website.
I want to say thank you
to the Department of Archeology and Historic Preservation.
They're the ones that gave us the grant to do the project
and the National Park Service.
They're the ones that gave them the grant,
so they would have the money to give it to us.
So I have to say thank you to both of them.
They're getting the bills paid.
And then I have my information here.
So my name is Michael de Lange, spelled like Michael de Lange,
D-E-L-A-N-G-E@seattle.gov.
I'm hoping to --
like I said, I don't want this to be the last word.
I hope it's the beginning of a conversation.
I want to stay in touch with people
who are interested in the project
and maybe what we do next, which gets me to my last slide;
Outcomes and Next Steps.
So we're going to have the final text report.
The final report text is available now.
We're going to have the final with all of the images
and everything graphically designed in a couple of weeks.
It'll have a list of properties
that the historian thought were significant.
Again, not definitive, but maybe enough to start a conversation.
A National Register of Seattle Landmark nomination
could come out of this.
It would take, you know,
community support for that to happen.
I think, yeah. It's not an instant process,
but it is kind of the organization of the report,
but not the only good thing that could come out of it.
There's going to be online story maps
that share the history in an accessible way
and tell stories about the history that we found
and based on places.
I know that that's going to happen
because I'm going to do that.
And then the historians, Gail and Laura,
they made a number of recommendations,
but one of them is a working group
of interested community members
who, you know, are interested in this history
and maybe interested in seeing further work in
that intersection between historic preservation
and disability history.
Whether that's writing a nomination,
whether that's other ways of sharing the history.
So don't be bashful. Get in touch.
I'm not quite sure what the shape of that
might look like now,
but I think there's a little bit of support
that we could provide that getting off the ground.
And then we had a storytelling project
that ran simultaneously to this,
to the research that the historians were doing.
And hoping to get some histories and stories
that kind of were outside the confines
of what that bureaucratic and academic text would require
and get people to tell their stories.
And this is a great place to wrap up
because Colin Wilfrid was one of the people
that organized the story gathering.
So we hope to continue doing that in the next year
or so as we discover stories
that maybe are important to share
but didn't make it into the report.
So with that I want to introduce Colin.
Colin is a recent graduate from the University of Oregon.
Go Ducks. Quack. Quack. -Yeah.
-With a major in political -- I went to U of O too.
With a major in political science
and a minor in disability studies.
Colin has autism and has served in leadership
for the Accessibility Student Union
and was also a member of the Coelho --
-Coelho.
-Coelho Law Fellowship program
that works to increase representation
in legal profession.
Next to Colin is Elizabeth Ralston.
Elizabeth is a consultant who guides organizations
and the strategic development of accessibility roadmaps.
She's also the founder
of the Cultural Accessibility Consortium;
grassroots effort to help arts
and cultural organizations improve their accessibility
for audiences, and was a great help with the project.
Next to Elizabeth is Michelle Bacca.
Michelle is a recent graduate
of the Masters of Urban Planning program
at University of Washington.
She also has a background in historic preservation
in disability studies
and a background in working
on senior living software and consulting.
And as an independent researcher,
she's hoping to enrich place experience
and conserve place memory
through built environment research and community building.
And the last person is Carol Rozumalski.
She's an accessibility coach
and strategic advisor with 20 years
of experience helping organizations
create more inclusive and accessible environments.
She is Gen Xer and predates the Americans with Disability Act
and is focused on using, you know,
strength of relationships to guide accessibility consulting
and funny stories.
She's good. She's a guess.
And with that,
we'll have a panel about the relationship
between disability activism and history.
And I'll let Colin take it over.
-All right.
Too many people believe we are broken and need to be fixed.
Too many people believe we need people
without disabilities to save us.
Too many people see disability as a bad thing
that they wish never happens to themselves.
Too many people assume that we cannot do the same things
they do, such as living on our own and graduating from college.
Too much media depicts us in a negative light as people
that the audience should never want to become.
All these social norms are some
of the most noteworthy examples of ableism in the United States.
If anything could change about the interactions
with people with and without disabilities
have with each other,
then perhaps people without disabilities
could benefit from changing their own attitudes.
Perhaps they can begin to understand
that our disabilities are just part of who we are.
Perhaps they can begin to listen to us
and respect what we believe we need to succeed.
Perhaps they can learn to look at us less for our disabilities
and more for our personalities and interests.
Perhaps they can realize
that we can't do the same things as people without disabilities,
we just need reasonable accommodations
to help us along the way.
Perhaps movies and TV shows will begin to depict us in ways
that make us feel seen.
Perhaps when someone joins the disability community,
they will understand that ableism is holding us back
and join the fight to stop it,
rather than think their lives of happiness are over.
When these good attitudes are expressed towards people
with disabilities,
it becomes evident that disability activism has
successfully been used to combat ableism.
All four of us on this panel
tonight have seen ableism at its worst,
as well as how successful disability activism has been
at changing the attitudes of people without disabilities
from negative to positive. As it turns out,
people with disabilities can achieve their desired goals,
and they are counting on people without disabilities
to not get in their way.
So, without further ado, let's begin our panel.
All right.
So what is your experience around disability and
disability activism?
-I guess I should start. My name is Elizabeth Ralston
and I'm a white woman with short silver hair,
and I'm wearing a blue dress with black
and white geometric shapes
that my captioner said reminded her of shells
without organs in them.
So really pleased to be here today.
I guess, I was born deaf and used hearing aids my whole life,
and then within the last 10, 15 years, I got cochlear implants,
which greatly increased my access to sound.
And I guess my experience with disability activism
had to do with, actually,
when I first moved to Seattle because all my life,
I was mainstreamed.
I didn't go to school for the deaf,
my parents were not interested in having me sign.
And so I was a passer of sorts.
I sort of flew under the wire trying to fit in
like everyone else,
and had a lot of internalized ableism as a result.
And it wasn't until I came to Seattle and --
actually before that,
when the ADA with passed in 1990,
I was in the Peace Corps in Africa,
and I was so excited about the ADA
because it meant that maybe, finally,
I can talk on the phone by myself
without my mother helping me make phone call
to maybe potential boyfriends or whatever.
And then I went to graduate school
and I used captioning for the first time in my life
in college, I had nothing.
I had maybe note takers.
I would ask people if they could take notes for me,
but that was the extent of my accommodations.
And then the ADA was passed, and then I went to graduate school
and got captioning and I aced all my classes.
Not that I didn't fail in college,
but I did much better in graduate school.
And then I moved to Seattle.
And at that time, this was back in the mid-1990s,
captioning was just starting to come out in the theaters
and I decided we need to have captioning in Seattle.
And so I worked with a group of people
and we called ourselves Captioning Seattle.
And we got captioning to the Cinerama,
which was then called the Cinerama,
now the Downtown SIFF Theater, whatever it's called.
And from there it spread to most of the movie theaters.
So I'll stop there.
I could go on, but I let my fellow panelists have a turn.
-Thanks. Hey everyone, I'm Michelle.
I'm a white woman with long brown hair
and two braids wearing all black with a long skirt pink birds.
So my experience with disability is I grew up with strabismus,
which is a -- it's a cranial nerve malfunction
in which both eyes don't look in the same direction
at the same time.
It's pretty common in folks on the spectrum.
And a lot of people hear it being referred to as lazy eye.
That's actually how I referred to it most of my life.
I just thought I had a lazy eye.
It wasn't until I was 30 that I heard that word, strabismus,
rather got that diagnosis, strabismus.
And then it wasn't even until a couple years after that
when I started taking disability studies courses
that I started to really personally identify
with disability and disability activism.
-Hi, I'm Carol. Nice to be here.
Colin, that introduction was fire, is that the right word?
Fire? Yeah. All right.
I want to follow up with what Elizabeth said, with,
"Where were you when the ADA passed?"
I'm glad to be old enough to remember that.
I was at the University of Washington
and interestingly enough, I was involved in a protest on campus
and we were advocating for the creation of a ramp
between Red Square and Drumheller Fountain.
I'm sure there's enough folks here from the area
that know the campus and, you know,
if you don't use that big stairway there,
you have to go all the way around to get to South Campus.
And quite frankly, that was a pain in the ass.
And so we were advocating
for there to be a discreet tasteful wheelchair ramp
along the side of Suzzallo Library.
So to get our point across a number of disabled students,
most of them wheelchair users like myself,
pardon me, I did not offer my visual description.
I am a wheelchair user.
I'm wearing a scratchy purple sweater
and I have tortoise shell glasses on
and some amazing red lipstick.
So hopefully that's a good enough description.
So we formed a blockade along that stairway
during the middle of the day
and we asked ambulatory people to go around that day.
People were pretty frustrated with us
and they didn't quite understand what the big deal was.
So luckily though,
a reporter from The Daily connected the dots
between the ADA and what we were doing.
And they asked us how we thought that ADA would change our lives
and we were pretty optimistic but guarded
because my experience with education,
and the same was probably true for some of the other students,
is we had to advocate every step of the way.
I'm old enough
that not every kid who was in elementary school
was mainstreamed in what we would call regular classes.
And I was the great experiment of the Ithaca School District.
I was the first child in a wheelchair
to be mainstreamed at my junior high and my high school.
And each step required a large amount of advocacy.
I even had to advocate for getting on stage
at my graduation.
And that really solidified my understanding
that disability and activism is a lifelong commitment and one
that we don't get to run away from.
-All right. This is Colin.
I am wearing a black mask,
a blue buttoned-down shirt and black slacks.
Tell us how you became disability activists,
or do you even see yourself that way?
-Should we go down the other way this time?
Well, Elizabeth and I were chatting before the panel today
and the conversation came up of are we big A activists
or are we little a activists?
And that's a real conundrum
that I think a lot of us wrestle with.
But to simply answer the question,
I would say, yes, I am an activist.
Not to show off the fact that I was protesting in college,
my understanding is that it's what you're supposed
to do in college.
And who knows what we have in the future around protests.
But I digress. But yes.
I mean, activism is a daily activity.
It doesn't ever really go away.
But because I'm smarter and older now,
I feel like I infiltrate different spaces
and I'm sneaky about my activism because I just show up.
And then people go, "Okay. What are we going to do?"
And then I say,
"Well, let me tell you, we can talk about it and work it out."
And that's where relationships and partnerships come into play.
None of us get to where we are on our own.
And I think that living with a disability
has taught me
that our culture really promotes this false sense of independence
that can be really harmful,
and it does have some ableist nuances to it.
But the harm is not just specific to people
with disabilities,
it's to anybody who's experiencing a struggle.
So I say, yes, I'm an activist and I do what I do,
not just for myself, but for everybody who struggles.
-I'll add -- this is Michelle.
I also struggled a little bit with the word activist.
It feels like a really big grand title.
But it's something that I am committed to,
especially as I am starting to get into the work
of historic preservation and writing and researching.
I think activism is going to become a really big part
of my work; something
that I want to get through in the things that I write.
So yeah.
It's something that I grapple with and the big A,
little a thing is very relatable.
But I think it's just, it's a mindset day-to-day.
It's every personal interaction.
It comes up in small places and in big places
and just something that I've committed myself to.
Yeah. I think I'll take the title.
-I think Carol has convinced me that I'm an activist.
-Yeah.
-Even though I never really saw myself as an activist.
I saw myself as an advocate and a relationship builder
and an educator and a connector.
And that's how I see activism happening.
Because, like you said, Michelle,
it feels like a grand title.
It feels like, you know, we're up on stage and, you know,
fighting for something and, you know,
making grand speeches and things.
I never really saw myself that way.
I saw myself as sort of working in the background,
kind of making things happen with the community
because you can't do it all alone.
And because I'm an art lover,
I grew up with a very musical family
and my parents took me everywhere.
They took me to theater, musicals and so on and so forth.
And there were no captions, nothing.
And so I relied on a script.
And so I endured a lot of ableism doing that
because people would tell me,
"Please turn the flashlight off."
And I'm using a tiny pen light and I'm going like this.
I'm trying to see the words and I'm trying to be unobtrusive.
And so through that experience,
I realized that there's a lot of inequity and access in the arts
because the art spaces are very alive and very historic, right?
We have the Paramount Theater.
We have a whole bunch of beautiful theaters
that are made for non-disabled people.
And so I started thinking about,
"Well, how can we make this more equitable for our people
with disabilities across the board?"
And so I founded
the Seattle Cultural Accessibility Consortium
as a way to get people together and learn about
how to make spaces and places and events
more accessible to people with disabilities.
So I guess that's a kind of activism.
-All right.
Do you think disability history has been overlooked in Seattle
and the United States?
-I start?
So as I've been saying, you know,
I'm doing this work in historic preservation.
So the way that I've really been learning about Seattle over
these past few years is through landmark nominations
in different documentation like that.
And Mike even mentioned it during his intro, 4Culture,
the work they've done.
I've gotten to intern with them last summer
and I inherited this big spreadsheet --
sorry -- of all the Seattle and King County landmarks
and looking for associations
with underrepresented communities.
And even those interns that worked on that spreadsheet
prior to me weren't always necessarily looking for
disability as part of that underrepresented communities.
So that was something that I brought into that study.
And something that I'm continuing to do
is just looking at these different nominations
finding the gaps
either where disability isn't engaged
or it's not really engaged in like a thorough holistic way.
And hopefully starting to rewrite some
of those histories too.
-I think that disability is overlooked in general
in almost every facet of life, arts, health,
education and so on and so forth.
Let's take the pandemic for an example.
How did the information reach disability communities?
How do people get to vaccination clinics?
I have a public health background,
so I'm always thinking with that lens of health and equity.
And so I worked with the public health department
to get messaging out to disability communities,
particularly the deaf community and the blind community
because how is information going to get to these communities
in an equitable way?
And so I think a group of people got together during the pandemic
and formed something called
the King County Disability Consortium,
and they meet every month.
And they talk about, you know,
things like exactly this issue of bringing thing
to the forefront of state government,
city government to try and get policies and procedures
in place for people with disabilities.
-I would say, yes, it is often overlooked.
As to why,
I think disability tends to be nested in the narrative
of other stories and we don't recognize
how disability for a particular story might be.
And so as somebody that holds stories,
I don't always know what people know and what they don't know.
And when I get asked to talk at events,
I'm often at a conundrum about what's going to hold
interest for people.
What are people going to connect with?
Because something that I think is boring
might be like really revolutionary for somebody.
I don't want to diminish that experience of learning
for somebody,
but I have to understand what's mundane and predictable
for me may be really unfamiliar and scary for other people.
And so I welcome the opportunity to use history
as a means of revealing those things.
-All right.
How can the ways in which disability history and activism
are represented in society be improved upon?
-Can I start with this one?
-Please do. -How much time do we have?
So for this one, I really had to kind of go to my favorites list.
In the ADA, there's a lot of preconditions as to
when you are protected
and when you are not protected from discrimination.
In particular, the employment title of the ADA
extends protection to qualified people with disabilities.
Well, how do you know if I'm qualified or not?
Isn't there a lot of implicit bias
that could influence
whether or not somebody thinks I'm qualified or not?
When I go into a job interview
and I'm driving in in my power wheelchair,
I'm queuing up a lot of biases.
I know that.
So I would like to see discrimination be prohibited,
period. Let me apply.
Let me not have to rest on preconditions.
So that's one.
Another one that I have is,
who gets to decide if I'm disabled or not.
Well, according to the ADA,
if I need a reasonable accommodation,
I need a doctor to declare that I am disabled
and that my disability impacts the accommodation
that I'm asking for.
Well, I go to a clinic and sometimes the doctor
that I talk to has only known me for 15 minutes.
Are they qualified to say whether or not I'm disabled?
I'm 53 years old and I've been disabled since birth.
I think my point of view ought to have more value
than a stranger's opinion that I met for 15 minutes.
And lastly, I would say that when we are working on activism,
we need to stop thinking about disability
as being an outlier in terms of civil rights.
The introduction to this event identified
that one in four people in the world have a disability.
And we are a very welcoming group.
At some point,
if you live long enough, you may become a part of our community.
I hope you have a long life.
The disability part, you can pick and choose for yourself,
whether or not you want that.
It might add some depth and texture to your life experience,
but I don't think of that as a requirement.
But really, we need to see disability as being central
to creating a healthy and thriving community
where we allow access and diversity to flourish.
So those are my big three.
Mic drop.
[ Applause ]
-How am I going to follow that?
-It's all yours.
-I think really that,
you know, disability is the largest minority
that anyone can join.
It's the only minority that anyone can join at any time.
-Anytime.
-Come on down. -And -- exactly.
And businesses and organizations need to be planning for this
because we hold a large stream of revenue
for these organizations
and they need to start thinking about
how to draw these audiences in,
how to get these people to bank the power with them.
The ADA has been around for over 30 years.
Where has it gotten us?
Yes, there have been improvements.
However, the ADA is the basement.
I call it the basement.
We need to go way above and beyond the ADA
to make our spaces more welcoming
and inclusive to everyone.
And this goes across employment.
You know, the hiring process, for example,
like Carol was saying so well,
make your hiring practices, your language,
and your job interviews welcoming and inclusive.
And don't make any assumptions about what we can and can't do.
And I would also like to say curricula needs to
really be changed in school, for example,
in medical schools, in universities,
there's a lot of medicalized ableism.
So when you show up at a doctor's office,
as Carol was saying,
there's a lot of discrimination and prejudice
against people with disabilities because of the medical model.
You go in there and you need to be fixed,
as opposed to seeing that society is the barrier itself.
What else?
I think I could go on and on,
but I think people with disabilities
need to be invited to the table; nothing about us without us.
I know it's a familiar refrain,
but it really means start building relationships.
We don't fight, okay? We are people too.
Maybe she does.
I don't know. -Sometimes. Yeah.
-So invite us to the table. If you're making policies,
if you're creating programs,
find out what we like because we are people too.
We want to have fun.
And we enjoy the outdoors.
We enjoy the arts and so, and so forth.
-Yeah, and I think just building off of ADA
as a bare minimum,
I think a big part of that is,
and what I try to do in my activism,
is really advocate for a more expansive understanding
of what accessibility really is.
Especially like in the built environment circles,
you know, I've taken architecture classes
and there is just this focus on ADA
and even more so it's a focus on architectural barriers.
But I think that it's important
to realize there's so many more barriers to engaging
with the world, with preservation,
with all of that beyond just these physical things.
I think also because,
you know, preservation tends to be my focus,
I think there's a big opportunity to open up archives
and sort of expand on some of these histories
that we're already praising and aware of.
One example that I've been looking at a lot
lately was part of my capstone at UDub
is the Naval Hospital Chapel, which is up in Shoreline.
And the site was developed originally as a naval hospital
for World War II.
It went on to become a tuberculosis clinic.
And now, it's a residential habilitation center
for intellectually
and developmentally disabled community.
And the focus of that nomination is really about World War II,
with sort of this nationalistic tone
and focusing on that one period of significance.
There's just a few sentences about the decades of
how that site has been used since.
And I saw that really as an opportunity to advocate
for deinstitutionalizing IDD care,
like making people more aware of what's going on here.
We're kind of bringing this site into the limelight
by landmarking it.
And there was a big piece of the story
that was missing in that landmark nomination.
So I think it's kind of exciting as a historian
to know that those archives can be dug into.
There's more story to tell, and yeah, that's what we need to do.
-All right. And last question.
Can you share ideas with the audience
about how they can work with you
or get involved with efforts to support disability activism?
-I would love to meet you and chat with you
about what you're interested in.
And I give a lot of presentations
and training around ableism.
And one of the things that I do is an activity
that really makes people move from
not really understanding what disability is about to
kind of a light bulb of changing an attitude
about who people with disabilities really are.
And so I really enjoy storytelling.
I really enjoy helping people think about what are some ways
that I can engage people with disabilities in my organization
whether it's HR programs or the arts or so on so forth.
Another way to get involved
is to look up
the Seattle Cultural Accessibility Consortium.
It's seattlecac.org.
And we do a lot of presentations and workshops
around accessibility in the arts.
And we would love panel, speakers, and experts,
and people just to come and share what it's like
for you to try to participate in the arts,
but are facing barriers or what are some successes
if you're an organization in integrating accessibility
within your organization.
I would love to, you know, know about those options as well.
-Some ideas I have about getting involved
in disability activism is to vote
and to vote conscientiously.
To vote thinking not just about
how representatives will impact you economically,
but how representatives and elected officials
forge the culture that we live in.
The ADA came about as a bipartisan effort
between Democrats and Republicans.
Tom Harkin, a senator, was one of the drivers.
Tom Harkin had a sibling who was deaf
and sparked his interest in disability rights.
Ted Kennedy and the Kennedy family
had people in their family with disabilities
that elevated their awareness.
Our veteran community has done a lot to elevate
what it means to fight for the rights of disability.
So please, especially when we're still in November,
consider how your vote has impact.
I also challenge you to consider
how you create a narrative around disability.
Words have power.
I recently saw a newscast talking about a man in Arizona
who was detained by the police.
He was a deaf individual who also had cerebral palsy.
The reporter described him as suffering from cerebral palsy.
He was actually at a convenience store buying a snack.
People who are suffering don't worry about snacks.
That's my understanding anyway.
I would also embrace you to consider
how you approach tough situations.
Do you embrace your own creativity
and your own problem-solving?
People with disabilities have to do that every day.
We're highly creative and imaginative
because we need that in order to navigate through life.
You have that power too,
but sometimes it can be scary to tap into that.
So really connect with us
and embrace that creativity and that growth.
-Yeah.
And I think it's really just about being open-minded.
And like when we think about accessibility,
it's about what people need.
So it's actually just listening to people when they tell
you what they need and accommodating when you can.
But also being creative,
like finding ways to make things work when you're not sure.
-And also, the concept of universal design.
What you do will benefit everyone,
not just people with disabilities.
-All right.
I think unless there's any other questions,
where it's time now to open up for Q&A.
And the way we do this is if you raise your hand,
I will come around with a microphone.
And that way we make sure that your voice is picked up,
and on our captions and on the sound recording.
So even if you think you have the loudest voice possible,
please let me bring the microphone to you.
-One of the things that I have been thinking about
recently is how we can have a greater integration
of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities
with the rest of the disability communities
because I see a big separation at this point.
And I don't think it helps either of us.
And I think we need to overcome that divide.
-I didn't know if anyone wanted to comment on that first.
-I agree with the woman who made that observation.
One experience that I had when younger,
was to be a counselor at a camp for people with disabilities.
And there seemed to be kind of a segregation between campers
who had disabilities
that impacted their learning and others who did not.
And I always found that to be a little bit disappointing to see
that we were doing among each other
what we experienced out in the world more broadly.
And so I think there's always an opportunity to engage,
and ask, and to lead with curiosity.
People really understand their own experiences regardless
of what their defined learning capacity happens to be.
So we really need to create space for that.
-I have a question.
Or I guess like kind of a framed question.
I don't know if like the two concepts relate to each other.
I was just kind of curious about the concept
of like somebody mentioned like universal design,
and what that meant,
and like what that meant for people
who sort of need accessibility.
And then the one question that I had
that was just beyond that was like, just in general,
if any of you had like one big change that you could make to,
I don't know, just like the way we build,
or transport,
or any of those things
that could just make things just across the board
just easier for everyone in general,
like what would that be and why?
-You talked about universal design.
-So universal design is the design of things
that accommodate the largest number of people,
to fit the largest number of people under a tent.
So for example, an example I like to give is the, you know,
those good grips potato pillows.
They're really thick and they have ridges on the side
that was created by an engineer
whose wife had very severe arthritis in her hand.
And you can grip a regular potato peeler very well.
So he created this large good-grip potato peeler,
and it turns out everybody loved them,
not just people with arthritis in their hand.
It was just easier for a lot of people to use.
And that's an example of universal design.
And captioning is another example of universal design.
Someone who is deaf benefits from captions,
but also people who are neurodiverse
and often benefit from captions.
And people who think that they don't --
that they have normal hearing,
but they're actually losing the hearing little by little,
but in denial, captions benefit those people.
And people who want to be on a bus
and read captions on the videos,
that's another example of universal design
that benefits everybody.
Does that help? -Yeah.
I would suggest that we share more information
about the environments that we host.
I definitely -- like, for me,
the things that I care about are like, what if I have to pee?
I mean, that's real, right?
The second thing is like, well, what obstacles,
what topography am I going to encounter getting to
your building
because there's a lot of broken sidewalks in Seattle.
And what do I think my experience is going to be
once I get there? So having access to the internet
is really amazing in terms of sharing information.
So with some small businesses that I've interacted with,
I've coached them to say,
"Hey, you're in a historic building,
and the accessible entrance is on the side.
It's not the main entrance."
You should post a photo of that entrance on your website
so people can recognize it and know where to go.
Also, universal design fits a lot of people,
but it doesn't fit everybody.
So sometimes knowing some alternatives
that may be available
for folks like the restroom on this floor
has the grab bar on the right.
On the third floor, the grab bar is on the left-hand side.
I happen to be a lefty.
And sometimes that's more disabling
than being in a wheelchair.
-Going off what you said, too,
I think universal design, it's important.
It's something to strive for,
but it's like a best-case that's actually not achievable, right?
Nothing is truly universal.
Should every place really be for every person?
But I think it's just basic things.
It's like a larger stall in the bathroom
that's nice for everyone.
Everyone likes to have a little extra space, you know?
So it's just small things.
If you make it accessible for one group,
you're making it more accessible for everyone.
And then the sidewalks, yeah, we just -- we got to fix that.
That's another bare minimum ADA thing in this city.
Yeah. -Sidewalks.
-I think this is really important to communicate
on your website or in your materials,
the transportation route that end up in front of your building
and how you get in the building.
The problem is,
so many organizations work on accessibility a little bit,
but they don't talk about it.
And so they expect people with disability to show up,
but how can they show up if they don't know
that their spaces or their programs
are going to be accessible?
So I say, shout it from the mountaintops
and let people know what you're doing.
-I'm just curious about organizations and/or companies.
I work with the deaf, and when I do my own talks or programs,
I invite my deaf friends.
But sometimes the people at the organization will say,
you know, interpreters are so expensive.
And I'm just wondering if your places of business,
do you have a fund that --
or is that ADA covered in
that you would have an accessibility fund
to pay for interpreters to pay for captioning?
-I can speak for MOHAI on this.
The ADA does not give organizations money
to make things accessible, unfortunately.
And the way we were able to move towards having
ASL interpretation and CART captioning
was getting a grant through IMLS.
The -- thank you, Institute for Museum and Libraries.
This was a few years ago, which is why it's not top of brain.
But what we did basically is we got that grant,
we had the grant money for a year.
We made it clear to the rest of the institution
how important this was
and how we were building connections with communities
that were using these services.
And then we're able to get it written into the budget.
But not all organizations can do that.
And I wish there was a better way
that -- I'll turn it back to the panelists,
but I just wanted to give that example of what MOHAI did.
-Well, I'll just say that if anybody,
if any organization receives federal funding,
then you are obligated, under the ADA,
to pay for an interpreter.
If you are a tiny organization
and it provides an undue burden on that organization,
then you're not liable to provide these accommodations.
I do not have an ADA background,
but there are some folks here who do have an ADA background
and can better speak to the legalities around that.
-Well, in respect to the problem
or the perceived problem of not having enough resources
to provide captioning or ASL interpretation,
businesses, regardless of what they do,
have overhead expenses that are either planned for
or not planned for.
And it's part of what you have to navigate
as a business owner or a proprietor.
And as Elizabeth stated, you know,
if you receive federal funding or even under the ADA,
you may be exposing yourself to risk for
not providing those things.
This is where relationship and connection, the community,
is really important
because you don't have to necessarily figure this
out by yourself,
but you need to be receptive to trying to work
through the problem and seeing how you can get there.
It's not going to be perfect right away.
We know that. We are experts at imperfection.
And we're not scared of it,
but what we really appreciate is
the demonstrated attempt to get there.
-I can also add one other thing is
if it's not enough buy-in from leadership of the organization,
it's not going to happen.
So really trying to build the case
so that you can get that money put into the budget is a way
to ensure that those funds are available
for interpreters or captioning.
-If I could add to that.
I just want to share an idea that I have been working on.
I live on a --
I live in a city
on a small island on the other side of the water.
And I've been talking with one
of the council members there about --
-You're talking about Mercer Island?
-No, I'm talking about Bainbridge Island.
And we are trying to establish an accessibility fund
that the city would put maybe $5,000 into each year.
And then if somebody was having an event
that they needed to, say, hire interpreters,
they could draw on that.
And if the money didn't get spent,
it would roll over into the next year.
And if it kept not getting spent,
then you could do something really big like a hearing loop,
which would be wonderful. So that's just a thought.
If anybody else wants to work on something like that.
-Hi, there. My name is Patty.
I'm an Asian woman and I use a sign language interpreter.
When you were talking about how big an impact you can have --
-- so the point is, hire people with disabilities
and pay them well so they can afford to live here,
they can afford to do everything they want to do,
they can advocate to remove barriers.
So you know, a lot of times people don't have the freedom
to get married because they're afraid of losing their SSDI.
And so you know, just as an example.
So if you're thinking about how to invest,
it's not just in investing in disability organizations,
it's investing in disabled people working in
those organizations at all levels,
and paying them well to do the good work.
And they can influence the policies, the access,
and everything else we need.
And so if, like you said, one in four people has a disability,
so where are they?
Let's get the ball rolling.
Let's get them into these positions, let's get them paid.
It'll be good for everyone.
-Right on.
[ Applause ]
-I think one of you mentioned internalized ableism,
especially during school years,
and I was wondering if you all
could talk a little bit about your experience
with internalized ableism.
-How much time do we have, Carol?
-Rock, paper, scissors. Yeah.
I'm glad you asked that question because I feel
like that's a continuous process of wrestling with that demon.
I happen to be like a really competitive person
and that really manifested in school.
And I remember being in Spanish 2 class,
and I was in the same class as the valedictorian,
and so I really wanted to do better in Spanish
than Brad Hayward.
And I remember that I got like a half a point higher
than Brad Hayward on the midterm,
and I just felt like that was the best thing,
but then it just kind of evaporated.
So but I've had to kind of unlearn around that as, yeah,
I can maybe get those victories, hollow as they are.
Brad Hayward doesn't care anymore.
That was like a long time ago.
But you get through different stages of life
and you think, "I got this." And I have to say
that in terms of being a working disabled person now,
that I am in a role where I am in executive leadership,
and I've been in this role for about a year and a half,
and I have felt some reemerging ableism inside of myself like,
"How did I get here?" Now, I can answer that question,
but we don't need to go down that rabbit hole.
But it's funny how you think you've got this stuff
under control and then something good happens to you, like,
"Oh, I'm in leadership now.
That's a good thing."
But then I'm like, "Okay, but what if I don't deliver?
What if I -- what about this? What about that?"
And then I have to like reevaluate
and then lean into my relationship.
And I do have people from my team here tonight,
which I really appreciate.
And I have good enough relationships with those folks
that I can say that and know
that it's not going to be weaponized against me.
But I'm figuring out. It's day to day.
Elections have a funny way of kind of reemerging a lot
of that stuff too.
So I mean, you know, I'd have to pay you money
as a therapist to go much deeper than that tonight,
but I really appreciate you kind of lifting that idea
up to talk about. Thank you.
-So I grew up in a family of three older brothers.
And I was expected to keep up with the conversation
at the dinner table.
And I'm a lip reader, so I had to keep up.
So I had to pretend a lot and just kind of pretend
that I knew it was going on instead of asking for help
and say, "Hey, slow down."
Much different now.
I'm like, "Shut up, shut up, shut up.
Wait, wait."
But back then, I felt like I wasn't allowed to ask for help.
Like even now,
asking for captioning sometimes make me uncomfortable
because I'm a good lip reader.
Why should I have to ask for help?
Why should I have to make other people pay for this?
So that is the type of thing
that goes through my head sometimes,
but I've worked through it.
I'm more self-aware now.
I have mostly more compassion for myself.
And I think this is true for any person with a disability
is you have to give yourself a break.
And think about, as an expression,
how many spoons you have to get through the day.
And I grew up in a family that was very ambitious,
very motivated, and so I felt like I had to be like that.
And I still am like that,
but now I can say, "Okay, you know, I'm tired.
I've been in five meetings, lip reading in five meetings,
I'm going to take a break."
So giving myself permission to really listen to those feelings
is, has been important.
-I have another question.
Also, like I guess like a reflection based off
of like what I've heard.
I think like -- sorry.
I feel like if I hold it, it's a little bit.
So I think that like we live in a society
that values like being convenient.
And I think like
when you guys say like being more accessible increases
the quality of life for people
who like don't have disabilities,
like I really do feel
that because it's allowing a lot more people to just have space
to just exist and not be convenient for society.
So that's my reflection off of what you guys said.
Another question that I have
is what were the most unique creative workarounds
to still provide accessibility for a need
that you guys ever seen?
-What a great question.
I need a minute to think about that.
-That's a great question.
-Yeah.
-Should we take another question while you ponder?
-This might be a cheap answer,
but what does come up for me is a book
that I read a long time ago called
"No Pity" which is written by Joseph Shapiro,
who is a NPR reporter
who has done a lot of reporting on the disability community.
And he has a section of the book that focuses in on technology
and how a lot of technology has been put forth
as an accommodation
or as a creative workaround for disability,
but then it gets integrated into society.
So typewriters, for instance,
were originally created to create braille documents.
And then people figure out,
"Well, you could also do this for written words as well."
So it got, you know, instituted more broadly.
So that's the kind of thing that I think is like, you know --
I mean, I have little workarounds
that I have in my home.
Like I have little grabbers mounted all over my condo.
So if I drop something, I can take one of those grabbers
and pick whatever I dropped up off of the floor.
That's not really an interesting example.
Typewriters are much more interesting.
But I would just lift that up as like, you know,
sometimes the creativity is right in front of us.
-I think also just to speak a little bit to the reflection
you were having there about like convenience.
I think a word that I hear a lot
that I've been seeing in the news today is efficiency.
And there's like this obsession with things being efficient.
But I think there really is space
to just experience things how they happen, right?
It doesn't have to be efficient or fast or whatever it is.
So I think that there's something there.
And then I think also
when it comes to like accommodations and things,
again, I always go to the preservation aid goal
when places aren't physically accessible,
there's a lot of leaning into technology now.
There's like virtual reality,
video tours, all of those things,
which is an accommodation.
But I think when we're talking about preservation and places,
like the place itself is important and getting there
and experiencing it is important not on a computer screen.
So kind of a both minds on that one.
-This is not exactly a workaround, but it sort of is.
But it's an organization
that I've come to really respect as an organization.
The values, accessibility,
and they use a lot of creativity
to make accessibility work through other patrons.
And it's an organization called Sound Theatre Company.
And they do access seating.
And they do -- they have people with disabilities on staff,
and on the board, and as actors.
They have a relaxed rehearsal.
So the rehearsals are not driven by time.
It's driven by the actors.
If they need to take a break, they take a break.
And the rehearsal resumes when everyone is ready.
They have a radical ticket pricing system
where you pay what you can.
And so they have a lot of different workarounds
to get people, anyone to come to the shows
and be able to access the shows no matter
what background you're from.
-Did you have a question?
-Hello. Thank you all for your talks.
I've learned a lot.
I was wondering if you could talk about some examples
of cross-disability organizing.
I know we kind of touched on this a little bit,
but in your experience.
-My experience around cross-disability organizing
was around campus experiences at the University of Washington.
And perhaps more recently,
Colin could maybe address what his experiences were
like at University of Oregon.
But places like colleges, universities,
places of education are natural gathering spots
for diverse people.
And that is where I had the most clarity
around having that kind of contact.
-I feel like the best example of that is the movie "Crip Camp"
where you have a bunch of campers
with disabilities coming in to a summer camp
and organizing around that.
-Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's on Netflix, "Crip Camp".
And it features Judy Heumann,
who is widely regarded as being the mother
of the modern disability rights movement.
Sadly, we lost her in 2023.
But she wanted to be a teacher
and took on activism in order to embrace that dream.
And a lot of groovy stuff
happens at disability camp for sure.
-I feel like that was a perfect encapsulation
of the disability rights movement.
-Yes.
-It's really exciting to see the history
of disability activism in Seattle being surfaced.
And it sounds like we have a 200-page document
that we can all read,
but I wonder if you have thoughts about
how that story can be told and in what forms
you might see that happening.
-I'll jump on in to that.
My role happens to be with the Department of Neighborhoods.
And we spend a lot of time centering community.
And it strikes me that while we are representative
of the disability community,
we are not representative of the community at large.
We do not have people of color on our panel
or at least none of us
have identified as being people of color.
So I think that naturally is a place that we need to go.
A lot of disability activism,
I think has a bit of a White appearance to it.
And we really do need to look at intersectionality,
and how other communities and cultures address disability,
and what solutions they have that are really great
that we can welcome into our community as well.
-You said it beautifully. -I talk too much.
I'm sorry.
-All right. Last chance for a question.
-Thank you all so much for sharing tonight.
I just wonder in these next several years,
if you have any advice on how to stay motivated
in your own disability activism?
-Burnout is real. It's really real.
And it's something I've been struggling with
for the last couple of years in fact
because sometimes it's a lonely road that you have to travel on.
And I know that there's lots of people out there
fighting the good fight.
But it does exhaust -- get tiring after a while.
But there's certain things that keep me going,
you know, it's convening like this.
It's a program that take place
that really center people with disabilities.
It's the question that get asked.
It's the light bulb moments.
So every one of those positive things get put back into my bank
so that I'm really renewed and refreshed.
-For me, it's about seeking joy.
It's not just about the activism.
The activism is what supports my search and my attainment of joy.
I love being alive.
I love being part of the community.
I love Korean dramas.
One of my goals is to get to South Korea one day.
And those things matter to me.
Activism matters to me too.
But it's not just activism for the sake of activism;
it's because of what it opens up for me and for others.
And that's what allows me to stay energized
because if we just look at where we are and where we could be,
we run into looking at what we don't have.
And that will most definitely lead to burnout,
like Elizabeth was saying.
So follow your bliss and let that affirm you.
-Thank you so much.
Let's give a round to all of our speakers.
-Good job. Good job. Good job. -And also to our partners
at the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods.
-Yay.