Disability Futures

Now, within the disability movement, there are hierarchies that have to be addressed. Urban, educated men with physical disabilities and blind men are the ones on top and everybody else falls underneath. Some of the grantmaking that we're doing addresses the need to diversify the movement, the need to bring in new voices, the need to hear from the grassroots, the need to hear from the very marginalized sectors. We give grants to raise the voices of women and youth with the disabilities. And to start to break down membership guidelines for umbrella organizations at the national level which don't allow Albinos or little people to be members of organizations, because they don't recognize them as people with disabilities, and because they don't want to share the small power they have, frankly.

For example, in Peru, we've funded groups of people with psychosocial disabilities and people with intellectual disabilities. Both have worked very hard to see that their rights are recognized in national laws and in national disability movements. Before the 2011 elections in Peru, the electoral commission removed over 23,000 people with psychosocial disabilities and intellectual disabilities from the voter registry. There was an amazing campaign, led in part by a young woman with intellectual disabilities who went to vote and found that she couldn't. She challenged this at the legal level. She also came to New York and spoke at the United Nations, very poignantly, stating: "I am a person too, I have political views, I have the right to vote." She, and many Peruvians behind her, including in the larger disability movement, were able eventually to reverse the removal.