National Agenda for Disability Rights

Hundreds of disability, civil rights and social justice organizations are uniting to promote shared values and goals for the disability rights movement. Help us create a common agenda for community organizing and coalition-building within the disability community. Contact us at info@ncdr.org to add your organization as a supporter of the National Agenda for Disability Rights.

Preamble:

As supporters of the National Agenda for Disability Rights, we affirm the following propositions and principles:

We assert that unintended barriers and intentional exclusion, deep seated prejudice and widespread institutionalized discrimination shut people with disabilities out of society and impoverish our lives.

We declare that these exclusionary practices restrict us far more than any medical, physiological or psychological condition or difference.

We call on our society to rectify this historic pattern of injustice by enforcing legal protections against disability-based discrimination and ensuring our right of equal access.

We affirm that the devices, services, and accommodations we require are not means of caring for those who are fundamentally dependent, but are alternative modes of functioning.

We assert our right to these modes as the means of both our individual self-determination and self-fulfillment, and out participation in and contribution to society.

We claim these protections and provisions, not as measures of charity, but as matters of civil and human rights.

We call upon our society to live up to its noblest ideals by guaranteeing citizens with disabilities equality of both opportunity and respect.

We envision a society that supports and celebrates the rich array of human differences by accommodating the myriad ways in which all people function.

We proclaim that ensuring justice, equality, and dignity to people with disabilities will strengthen the rights and respect accorded to all citizens by building a society truly pluralistic, democratic, and open to all.

Guided by these principles and representing America’s many diverse disability communities, we join in a cross-disability campaign to advance the rights and interests of Americans with disabilities.

Goals and Values:

Goal 1: Increase the availability of affordable, accessible, appropriate housing of their choice for people with disabilities in America.

Value Statement: We value availability, affordability, accessibility, appropriateness, and individual choice in housing. Appropriate housing depends on the needs of individuals and may include physical access, location of supportive services, flexibility of policies, availability of usable transportation, and other factors.

Goal 2: Increase availability and coordination of community-based, health, mental health, housing and other services of their choice for people with disabilities.

Value Statement: The disability community of America values, health care, mental health care, housing, transportation, and other services in their communities rather than in segregated settings. We value individual choice, self-determination, and range of options in these services, including the choice to decline services. We encourage creativity and effectiveness in development of service delivery systems.

Goal 3: Ensure availability and accessibility of public and private transportation mechanisms for people with disabilities.

Value Statement: The disability community of America values access to public transportation that meets our needs as a matter of course, rather than as a special favor. We value the integration of services to the disability community into the overall public transportation system.

Goal 4: Design and implement an effective and competitive education system for students with disabilities which includes appropriate integration and specialized services and supports.

Value Statement: The disability community of America values the integration of students with and without disabilities. The disability community values the provision of educational and supportive services that are appropriate for each maximizing integration and educational benefit.

Goal 5: Educate communities about disabilities and disability social history for the purpose of eliminating discrimination, implementing disability rights and increasing responsibility for disability rights.

Value Statement: The disability community of America values the understanding of and voluntary implementation of disability civil rights. We seek to preserve disability rights social history to foster an understanding of disability rights as basic civil and human rights.

Goal 6: Improve enforcement, stop restriction, and expand disability rights laws.

Value Statement: The disability community of America values the existing disability rights laws and the enforcement mechanisms in place to enforce them when voluntary compliance does not occur. The disability community opposes efforts to make enforcement more difficult or to limit protection.

Goal 7: Increase gainful employment of people with disabilities and reduce the disproportionately high level of poverty among Americans with disabilities.

Value Statement: People with disabilities are twice as likely to live in poverty as other Americans. The disability community of America values the opportunity to work and to be valued, paid, and recognized equally for our contributions to the workplace.

Goal 8: Increase responsiveness of government agencies to the needs of people with disabilities.

Value Statement: The disability community of America values the opportunity to participate meaningfully in, and benefit from, government programs and services and to have disability issues integrated in all levels of government.

Goal 9: Assure a system of universal health care that meets the needs of people with disabilities.

Value Statement: The disability community of America values health care that is accessible and readily available, that is flexible enough to meet the needs of people with various disabilities and health care needs, that treats the whole person, that values individual choice (including the choice to decline services), and that is available to everyone.

Goal 10: Develop a health care system that bases treatment on the needs and choices of the individual without bias.

Value Statement: The disability community values health care that does not discriminate on the basis of racial, ethnic, or cultural background or regarding the nature or severity of the person’s disability. Discrimination in this context includes lack of physical or communication access, denial of personal choice (including the choice to decline services), and denying services based on existing or possible future disability. The disability community values health care that facilitates independent living.

Advocacy and Community Organizing

NCDR is the association of nonprofit state cross-disability coalitions uniting organizations and advancing civil rights, social justice and economic opportunity.

Road To Freedom Bus Tour and Traveling Exhibit

The Road To Freedom bus tour and disability rights history exhibit has traveled to all 50 states and attracted widespread media attention at events in more than 120 cities.

ADA Watch

ADA Watch is a rapid response network of hundreds of national, state and local disability, civil rights and social justice organizations united to advance the human rights of people with physical, mental, cognitive, intelectual and sensory disabilities.

Campaign for Fair Judges

NCDR & ADA Watch engage in public education supporting judicial nominees to the Federal Courts and Supreme Court whose records demonstrate a broad interpretation of disability rights and civil rights laws.

Public Policy and Government Relations

NCDR advances social change by educating policymakers and generating grassroots support for budget priorities and legislation impacting access, inclusion and economic opportunity for children and adults with physical, mental, cognitive, intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Preserving and Promoting Disability History

NCDR engages in public education and the promotion of programs and initiatives to preserve disability rights history. NCDR joins forces with those educating communities about disabilities and disablity social history for the purpose of eliminating discrimination, implementing disability rights and increasing responsibility for disability rights. We seek to preserve disability rights social history to foster an understanding of disability rights as basic civil and human rights.

Most Americans are familiar, as they should be, with the struggles of African Americans, women and other minorities that led to the attainment of enhanced civil rights for these constituencies. Fewer Americans are familiar with the history of the disability rights movement, a “people’s movement” which includes traditional lobbying and grassroots organizing, as well as civil disobedience and mass arrests. Rather than a focus on sympathy, pity or charity, It is a story of inclusion, empowerment and the creation of a social movement.

NCDR seeks to preserve this social history by including leading disability historians such as Professor Paul Longmore on our National Advisory Council and by promoting the work of acclaimed disability rights photographer, Tom Olin. Olin’s work, illustrating Arlene Mayerson’s written “People’s History of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” is at the center of the Road To Freedom’s traveling disability rights history exhibit and will continue to be highlighted in the Disability Rights Concert series. His work will be central to the soon-to-be-released Road To Freedom documentary film and book.

The Road To Freedom traveling disability rights history exhibit also features the nationally acclained 24-panel disability history exhibit produced by Advocates Coming Together (ACT), as well as the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Developmental Disabilities’ Parallels In Time, a comprehensive history of disability through time.

The Road To Freedom traveling disability rights history exhibit has traveled to all 50 states and more than 120 cities, has received widespread media attention and has been formally recognized by scores of Governors, Mayors, Members of Congress, and other policymakers across America.