pages: CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf, 4
This data as json
body | date | page | text | path |
---|---|---|---|---|
CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities | 2017-04-12 | 4 | ITEM 2-B COMMISSION ON DISABILITY ISSUES MEETING MINUTES OF Wednesday, April 12, 2017 6:30 p.m. end up in the institution that's a lot easier, and then that means providing support for the family oftentimes. Stuart James: Now within the context of all of those services, how we put that together is up to me. How we premise what the agency represents and want to do is up to me and my staff. It's been one of the problems with independent living centers because there are three in the immediate area. There's one in Hayward, there's on in San Francisco, and us, and if you were to walk into any of the three you would think you were in three completely separate organizations. Even though we provide the same fundamental service, we don't have the same philosophical approach to those services, so they're very different. I am on the progressive end. I'm an integrationist, and I think everything we do for disability should be about how to integrate people with disabilities into broader society. And we are practicing heavily a thing called reverse integration. Instead of trying to make an environment suitable for someone with a disability, I'm creating an environment that's for disability and making it suitable for people who don't have one. Stuart James: One of the things we do is, I use my background in sports for this, and I brought the Harlem Globetrotters in to play wheelchair basketball. On the slides you see now, Michaela, is a little boy from Alameda Boys and Girls Club playing wheelchair basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters. We had about 150 kids. This lesson is not only for the people who have disabilities, it's actually for the broader community. I want them to have a positive conversation about disability, not a negative one. And I want them to have a positive experience with disability, not a negative one. So we do things that are fun. We don't think wheelchair basketball is really an adaptive sport, I think wheelchair basketball is its own game, and you just play it and it's its own game, don't compare it. The kids had a great time and they got a valuable lesson, and the gentleman who runs Alameda Boys and Girls Club said that it was just a profound experience for most of the kids. Stuart James: And that's Buckets Blakes, another Harlem Globetrotter. He's been to three of them. We've done the one in Oakland, one in Berkeley, and one in Alameda, and SO he came again. He actually was awful the first time he came, now he's very good. [laughter] That presented kind of a problem. We used to be able to show off and now we can't. In fact one of the projects I'm hopefully working on soon, this was so successful that some other people in the disability movement who have been working on some issues in Cuba have asked me to try to arrange this to go to Cuba, and bring the Harlem Globetrotters there to play wheelchair basketball. So it's kind of cool. Just another one, again with Buckets and the girls. In this case, we had one or two kids with disabilities, not many of them, again just to have a conversation with the broader community. This is another thing, we already, before moving to Alameda, we already had a pretty good relationship with Alameda Unified School District and the transition kids. Stuart James: We have a program now that we don't do with Alameda, we do it with Oakland where the transition kids come into our office twice a week, and one class they learned self-advocacy, so they learn about what it means to advocate for the things they have a right to. That class culminates by them going to Sacramento and talking to legislators about issues that were important to them. Then the second part of it is self-determination, learning how to set goals, and achieve them. But we also do, within the context of that group, we do a number of special events that are for other school districts and Alameda Unified participates in those. This happened to be, I think, our Halloween party, and that young man I believe as an Alameda High School transition student. 05/24/17 Page 4 of 29 | CommissiononPersonswithDisabilities/2017-04-12.pdf |