MIA’S SPACE: Community Builders Make Space for Everyone
Last issue, I wrote about how engagement in the same activities that everyone else engages in – work, school, leisure, sports, worship – is more likely to ensure safety and well-being for people with disabilities than formal programs ever could.
In June, the Georgia Council on Developmental Disabilities (GCDD) received the Full Community Inclusion award at the American Association for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) conference for the Real Communities initiative. Let me connect some dots to close the circle.
Real Communities began as a gleam in Eric Jacobson’s eye. He had been reading John McKnight, Mike Green, U Theory, and he took the staff on retreat to discuss changing our grant making efforts toward asset-based community development and a broader vision of inclusion. Our first reaction was bafflement. We had not read what he had read or talked to the people he had talked to. We asked Council members to fund a study year to catch up. We visited other communities trying out these new ideas, held mini conferences to bring people together and gradually operationalized these ideas.
We hired a “community organizer” who didn’t have background in intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD), but instead a social justice orientation. Caitlin Childs was relatively young, relatively unschooled in service structures for people with disabilities, but she intuitively understood the essence of supporting people to belong.
We were awarded a grant that went outside typical federal parameters to focus on community instead of people with I/DD specifically. We funded initiatives communities cared enough about to act on, instead of what WE thought they should do. Our only requirement was that they had to include people with disabilities in the projects. We paid local community builders to guide the work. Again, we found more success with people who were community members with no preconceptions about what people could or could not do.
The things that started happening were the stuff of typical life in the community. Not “special” and that was the point. Over the course of Mia’s life, I have, like most parents, wavered between wanting everything any system will give me to wanting a life for her that was just like everyone else’s. I guess right now we have about the best balance we could have – enough “system” to support her daily routines, a great job and a family with a lifetime commitment to her. And lots of typical.
Real Communities is the manifestation of new thinking that is also as old as community itself. Real Communities will ensure access to everything else this issue covers – travel and recreation, housing, financial security. This is the point of Olmstead. This is what Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services means by “home and community-based.” It is important to tell this story and Councils should fund that effort. There are no better authors than the community builders themselves. Caitlin; Teri, Johnny, Jessica and Barry; Basmat, Jenna and Suliamon; Betty, Dorinda, Stacey, Laura and Shelva; and the new community builders -- these folks forge and facilitate relationships and make space for everyone.
People who had lived on the margins became members. Membership is inclusion. Inclusion is belonging. Belonging keeps you safe. Dots connected. Circle closed.
Read the entire summer issue of Making a Difference here:
