Blogging for access

Today I embrace being a small connective part of this fabric we call "life" in a differently intentional way.  I am blogging for access.

My friend, Lana (fellow HCHS alum), works at the Independent Living Resource Center in San Francisco.  This one sentence represents three things close to my heart. 

Lana and I met when we were barely teens...and have become "new" friends through the magic of social media.  I had the pleasure of seeing Lana in person for the first time in twenty-plus years this past winter.  We met for dinner in Oakland's Chinatown, me with my kids in tow.  It turned out we had very close friends, who were in turn, close friends.  It was a lively and special gathering, all of us together.

San Francisco is one of those places for me.  It's where I truly began to flex my wings of independent adulthood.  It's where I fell in love with the person I would end up marrying.  It's where I experienced the "big one" (the World Series earthquake and I shared space during the ten months I lived there).  It's where La Cumbre ruined all other burritos that would come after.

I love and admire people and organizations who strive to integrate themselves and/or others within their communities, who stand up and advocate for what should be, but isn't quite, yet.  The Independent Living Resource Center is such an organization.  And by writing today, I become part of their community, as well as, reinforcing my place in our larger world.

Access is a key concept and factor in the inclusion of anyone to anything.  And in the world of people living with disabilities it has long been a clarion call for action. 

Most kids with disabilities growing up in the United States today have their rights to access protected through their automatic coverage by public schools who are required to serve the kids until they are eighteen, sometimes a bit older.

But, for adults living with disabilities (I am speaking here, primarily, about developmental disabilities), their access to, well, access, can and often does shift dramatically once they become of age and are sent out into the adult "system" or world.  (The Americans with Disabilities Act serves as the protecting agency for the rights of adult with disabilities.)

Conceptually, access is at best and worst, an attitude.  Individually and institutionally, we can grant or deny access to someone or something with the flick of a mental switch.  We include or we don't.  We believe in someone or we don't.  We get creative together or we don't.  We are or we are not (we are what we think, right?)

Logistically, access is both simpler and more complicated.  It's about adaptive machines and tools (ie. wheel chairs, communication devices), it's about reworking proverbial, and literal, road maps in very concrete and detailed ways (ie. curb cutouts, signage in Braille), it's about raising and training a professional work force of educators and support personnel to most successfully integrate our society, to teach us how to be, all together.

Without the concept of access, nothing could follow.  And, lucky for us, changing to and/or maintaining a pro-access state of mind is free!

However, logistically, as things currently stand, access costs a lot of money.  And requires boatloads of energy and patience.

If you are visiting my blog today as part of Blog for Access, I'm guessing I am preaching to the choir.  But, I invite you, dear reader (as one of my favorite authors Stephen King calls us), to think about not only what you can do to become more connected with access for individuals with disabilities today and in the future, but also, how you can learn about what folks are already doing in your existing communities, and celebrate them now...volunteering time, donating funds, maybe blogging yourself, this time next year, to share the good fights for justice happening in your own corners of the world.

Lana, I thank you for creating this opportunity to think, reflect and share.  And I thank you for the hard work you do to improve access for the adults living with disabilities in San Francisco and the greater Bay Area community.

Peace and love.

P.S.  In the past I have been a teacher's aide, a teacher, and an adjunct professor, all in the field of special education.  I received a Master's in Education from Lesley University with a specialization in Intensive Special Needs.  The battered used paperback that started it all, Son Rise, came into my life when I was a teenager, right around the time I met Lana.  This makes me smile today.