 Hi everybody. Thank you all so much for coming to this disability awareness month event. My name is Jenny Sandler. I'm the Director of Access Services and the Chief Era of Highline and want to welcome you all here today. Before I formally introduce our speaker today, I would like to show a video that she did in this past summer. As many of you may know, it's the 25th anniversary of the American with Disabilities Act. We're having it later in the month to celebrate that and give a little bit more about the history of that important legislation. But I would know but spoke in downtown Seattle at an ADA rally and I thought it was a powerful, powerful message. We kind of wanted to start with that today and then I will introduce her. Latvia was part of the Soviet Union and for the first in a Soviet orphanage. After being adopted, moved to the United States and being diagnosed with autism, Ivanova started school. Throughout school life, Ivanova struggled with loneliness and isolation that many individuals with disabilities face throughout their school life. Often in the name of inclusion or mainstreaming. Today, Ivanova is a college graduate with a bachelor's degree in history from Central Washington University. A University of Washington LEN fellow in leadership education in neurodevelopmental and related disabilities. A civil rights advocate and a part-time faculty here in our chief program at Highline. Very honored to have her here with us. As we see increasing numbers of students with disabilities accessing higher education, Ivanova is going to be sharing with us a timely and powerful message about true inclusion. Hello everybody. My name is Ivanova Smith and I'm really excited here to talk to you about inclusion. I'm really passionate about trying to make sure that every person with a disability, no matter the severity, has a place in this world and that we are all part of this community together and we will all be included and have access. So I'm really excited to say to you some ways that we can make that happen. Because of the space we have here, I was wanting to do this rock paper scissors game where we find a partner and you play rock paper scissors. If anybody doesn't know what rock paper scissors is, it's a game where you rock, paper beats rock, rock beats scissors and scissors beats paper. Does that make sense? What I want you to, if it's, I'm not sure what the safety standards for this would be. If you really carefully move. Right. Yeah. Do I have a record of inclusion? Okay. So I was going to have us act out this game and play it so that you would have a physical experience with it. Basically I wanted to show is the version of this game that has everyone being able to participate even if they lose. So what you would have done if you had played this game is you would have gotten with a partner, you would have done rock paper scissors and the person who lost, they would start cheering for the person who won and a line would form around the person and everybody would be cheering until you got two crowds of people cheering for their side and then there would be a big one, two people battling it out and everybody cheering behind them and that is how the game would end with everybody cheering and everybody participating and being happy and being able to be involved. And the point of that game I wanted to show that no matter your skill level, no matter what abilities you have or limitations you have there's always a way that you could participate in any activity and so even for the person who lost they still got to participate to the end just like the person who won. It was just in a different way and so if we learn about all the different ways a person could participate in an activity it would help us increase our understanding of inclusion and allow more inclusion. So another thing I wanted to talk about is the difference between mainstreaming and inclusion. Now I would just like to know a little bit about my audience here. How many are here are students? Okay, how many here are faculty? Alright, how many here are community members that come from the public? Anybody? Okay, awesome. So one thing with some people, some of you may have been aware of mainstreaming where you may have in when you were in high school or in grade school you may have saw one or two disabled students in your classes. Now the issue with mainstreaming that I have experienced in my own personal life is that it wasn't really a positive experience. Mainstreaming first came out and when IDEA came out it was an act that helped be able to make the schools more accessible for students with disabilities and helped form the special ed program in IEPs. They started doing the mainstreaming and I was one of those IEP kids when I came to this country in 1994. I was mainstreamed and I had sometimes I was in the special ed classes and those were honestly the best times for me. Now a lot of students didn't like being secluded in the self-contained classroom but for me because of the amount of bullying I had to go through and the lack of support that I got, I actually didn't like mainstreaming. I felt very isolated and I didn't have access to my community. I didn't even know about my community because for a long time I didn't know about what type of disability I had. Why was I struggling with learning? Why was I in special ed? These questions I didn't know and it made me struggle with my own identity trying to figure that out. I wasn't able to be with my own community. There were people in my life that were telling me, well we don't want you to associate with those students and they were talking about the students in the self-contained classroom which most, the majority of intellectual developmentally disabled students are put in and I also saw disparities because even though I had a negative experience I did have more academic access. I was able to take history classes and math classes and English classes but my ID peers that were in the self-contained classroom they wouldn't love to have access to these academic courses. In a way it is a lot like this model. You have a couple of students are allowed to be included allowed to have academic courses where you have a lot of, they don't get any participation at all they're blocked as you can see and the typical students they get to see everything and that's great and all but the problem is what about the student right here? Their education is lacking they don't have the same equity, they don't have the same equality of education as this student may have and even though you know there were times that I felt like this student but in the classroom I felt like this student because I felt like even though I was there in the class I wasn't wanted, I wasn't valued there would be times that students would be like why are you in this class or nobody wants you here that was my history, that was what happened to me and I mean dealing with you know being on the mainstream bus it honestly made me not want to be with typically developing students because they didn't want me, they didn't like me and I didn't understand why and so looking at that past I've seen now that there was a real equity issue I wasn't getting the support I wasn't getting the protections because even though my ID peers they were not in academic classes they had more protections they were able, they had their identity, they had their community I didn't have, they had a protection from the bullies they had protections in other ways that I really wanted friendships that I could have built with people I related with and I couldn't get access to that and so that is why I want to fight for this model of inclusion that people, everyone is included, every student there's no self-contained classroom I want an inclusion that the people that need support they get the support they need and this may mean reformatting assignments because not everyone can write with their hands or you know type with their fingers sometimes people learn the best by speaking it out or drawing a visual understanding of it people with intellectual and developmental disabilities it's not that we don't learn it's that we learn differently we learn in a different way we may learn slower it may take us more time we may have to repeat ourselves to learn things but that doesn't mean that we soon have access to all the academic courses out there so that we can have the highest quality education and be able to have access to higher education I would love to find more institutions educational institutions that would go that would think about what are the different ways that people can express their knowledge is it only writing and reading or are there other ways that people can express it I think we are and if we start looking and we start being creative about how we do assignments and how we allow people to express their knowledge in multiple different ways that our education system can become accessible to intellectually and developmentally disabled people it may take more time it may take changing the assignments a little bit so that it's more formatted to what the student can understand and learn to their style sometimes people struggle with this because a lot of times people think oh well putting the boxes like this it takes away a box from this kid it's not that this kid's box got taken away this kid didn't need a box he was fully able to see in everything he just doesn't need it well these other two they needed to be able to see and participate and so what we want and inclusion is for everyone to be able to participate and maybe they need more support to do that maybe we need to rethink how we allow people to express their knowledge that is what I want to try to show with inclusion with this model just because a person may learn differently doesn't mean they shouldn't have access to all the academic courses I mean there are people in the past that told me you can never be a history major you can't learn history but I proved those people wrong and I said to them I love history I absolutely love academics but because my community has been so excluded from academics it's hard for me because I want to prove that my community can be just as academic as any other community so there are some barriers to inclusion that our history has shown us and I'm going to talk about these barriers the first one is the mental age theory and this is just a visual representation of it this was an old diagram from the eugenics era and it shows the different ways that people categorize people with intellectual disabilities back in those days you may be familiar with these words has anybody been familiar with these words? in Brazil, idiot, moron you've all heard those words before those were all diagnostic categories for intellectual disability at the time it was called feeble mindedness which later was replaced by the all word mental retardation this theory basically says that people with intellectual disabilities are mentally children that we are stuck as children even when we're adults and there are a lot of people that they still treat people with intellectual disabilities this way I've actually been treated like this myself being a married college graduate that's a part-time faculty at this wonderful institution it's really awkward when people call me kiddo yes oh, you're so sweet to that young boy you're so sweet to that young person but they may speak in a more singing, singing voice to me it's like oh you're just so cute and it's like yes I'm holding this little Chewbacca here my little comfort buddy and I understand that some people may look at that and say oh well look at you you're holding a little toy of course you're mentally a child and people may see that on the street because they don't know me but the thing is I want you all to think about we all have childhood passions that we still enjoy people that still have no disabilities whatsoever that have a child-like personality they just like child-like things my sister for example she has no disabilities, no developmental disabilities but boy is she obsessed with Care Bears like she's upset I mean she has the trash can and the posters and she has all the Disney posters and all of the figurines and she wears the sweatsuits I mean she's a big Care Bear fan but I still respect her as my adult sister she's older than me and she can drive and she does all these other things and she's an adult and other adults they're respected even with their child-like passions and I think the same needs to be said for people with intellectual disabilities yeah I have a child-like personality that doesn't mean that I'm not an adult I'm 27 years old I'm an adult and that's true for all people with intellectual disabilities that when we become adults we become adults we have the same passions as other adults we have the same interests I mean there's so many things we can learn if we realize that and see that ID people are not children when we become adults we're adults and we need to be prepared for that our youth needs to be prepared for that and so that's one barrier that's really black people and this has actually prevented people with intellectual disabilities from getting married this has brought black people from getting into a relationship because they are having children like for example you know they would take the child as they would take the child away from an IDD mother and they would say it's because they're mentally a child they can't their child themselves they can't take of a child and that is why I want to debunk this theory because I believe people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have the right to have children and have families and be able to explore and celebrate all of these adult things that we get the privilege we get the privilege to have when we become the age of majority it's also difficult when I'm wanting to go get older or drink and I have to convince people and then it's like but I always sell my ID so they have to shut up then so the next one I want to talk about is this little boy and he represents pity so for a lot of people with disabilities they've had to deal with this it's people looking at them and saying oh your life must have been so awful your life must be so terrible I feel so bad for you and they don't really see the person's accomplishments or see what they are doing and see how do they feel about them lives because when people look at me and they say oh was it like struggling with autism and I'm like being autistic I have no problem being this way I don't like how society treats me but I like being this way and I like it when people love me and see how epic it is but I mostly have a problem when people have a bad attitude about it I love I like my life I'm happy you don't need to pity me I live my life just like any other human being and that's the same for any other person with a disability they live their life just like any other human being yeah there will be difficult times but that's true for everyone and so we're all people we're all humans and we all have times of suffering but we also all have times of joy and we all have passions and values and we want those to be seen and we want all of our identities to be seen not just our disability identity but other identities we may have our cultural identities our sexual orientation identities our gender identities all of these different identities come into play with every different our personal disabilities we all have different identities and we don't want all of our other identities being masked behind disability all the time now I'm going to talk about the Superman now the Superman theory is kind of like the extreme opposite end of oh you're so inspirational just because you got up in the morning it's like oh my god and also this one has been used for something called which a famous activist Stella Young who recently passed away she brought up this phrase called inspiration porn and it's basically the idea that there are images that are used that non-disabled people use of people with disabilities to build inspiration have you ever seen the images of like a little kid running with you know, paralytics and it's like you're at the only disability is a bad attitude even by seeing those yeah that basically is an example of inspiration porn because it basically first it guilt strip people and if you're having a bad day get over it because look at these poor disabled people they have to live with it kind of thing and so it kind of mixes with pity together because and also it's not good for disabled people because when we have that bad day you know my attitude if I'm a person that's in a wheelchair my attitude is not going to change the fact that I can't get up these stairs and that is actually the point that Stella Young made that it doesn't help people with disabilities it honestly puts them in an awkward position when they can't do everything that the poster makes them out to be you know we're all human and we all going to have bad days and we shouldn't be shamed for that or say being disabled is just having a bad attitude being disabled is an identity and it's an identity that needs to be respected and it's not an attitude problem for somebody to say hey I'm disabled and I have a limitation with this that's not a bad attitude that's a person that needs accommodation and accessibility so the next one is the spread effect and basically what that one says is basically the idea that the disability it's like what I was saying earlier with a lot of other identities in a person gets erased when they're identified as disabled and sometimes there's people with disabilities that they don't want to identify with their disability because I don't want to over saddle my other identities because these other identities I may have are more important and also it's frustrating when you may have like you may have one ability that may be different from what is characterized with your disability and people get all shocked and they're like how are you able to do that you had this disability and it's like well I don't have that aspect or that my disability doesn't affect me in that way for example a lot of people with disabilities have had to deal with people asking about oh can you have sex yeah like there are people with disabilities that they've had to deal with that when people think because you have a disability you can't do that and that's an example of the spread effect so that's an also an issue for people with disabilities that have to deal with people thinking their disability affects them in a way that it doesn't and all of these all of these connect together because thinking somebody mentally a child also makes you think oh they can't you know those aspects their disability makes them can't do all these other things really they can so they all interconnect so I'm going to talk about language here and so the two different models of language that people use people first language which is very popular in the intellectually disabled community and identity first language which is very popular in the artistic community actually but I actually respect both and I see you know I believe that every person with a disability they have a different aspect they have a different view and perspective on their disability they don't they may not want to identify it they might want to say I'm a person first you know my disability is secondary and so you know it's more respectful to use people first language with people that that's how they feel about their disability and that should be respected just like it should be respected if a person says well I do identify with my disability I take great pride in it and that should be just as cool too because what's wrong having pride in your disability that's awesome I have great pride in my disability and I actually use I use a mix of the two now but I used to just use call myself autistic all the time but I learned since I met other people that were more in this category liking people first that you know people first language has this value that basically what people first language came out during disability civil rights movement and it basically was saying we want to be seen as equal people people like you we don't want to be seen by our disabilities because at the time you know that label of disability like mental retardation it put people in institutions it imprisoned people it took away people's rights it took away people's freedoms and so that label became very negative but people first wanted to get the idea that were people were humans we said have the same equal rights we said have the same respect we said be free like everyone else and so that is the main point of people first language and I think that that's historically very valuable and identity first language really you know it used to be used in a label type way that was very negative back in the 1950's and so because the word mental retardation actually was the politically correct word back then like it was the word that replaced feeble mindedness and so that's the one thing I want to think about with language is you know when people say oh we just need to ban these words and replace them well we already done that with feeble mindedness so I think that really we should concentrate more on the attitude behind the language you know when you call somebody we're talking what is your attitude behind that or when you think when you think of people with a type of disability in a negative light or you think of that disability in a negative light you're basically sowing a a negative attitude towards that and so I you know I don't care people want to use it in the scientific sense of oh you know I'm driving down the road and the car behind me the car ahead of me is retarded to the speed of 50 when it really is 60 the speed limit is 60 or something you know if you're using the scientific way that because the word retarded means slow it doesn't but it's different when you're using the context of oh my homework is so retarded and I've heard this phrase over and over again and I honestly respond to these people who say that like how does your homework like me it's because this person they put a negative stance on the word that's why I have the issue with because it says that that is bad that being slow is bad that being slow is negative and annoying and but I want to change that so that people understand that being slow isn't a bad thing having trouble learning or being slow at learning having a different way of learning shouldn't be seen as a bad thing and so I don't really want to focus on banning language I want to focus on banning the mean bad attitudes about people with intellects or developmental disabilities does that make sense to everybody cool so now I want to go into the history of the eugenics movement so the eugenics movement was it was started with Darwin and he created the survival of the fittest and social Darwinism but his cousin looked at his work his cousin Francis Glonton looked at his work and said oh I really like this and took some of it and used it to create eugenic science which basically was to him the science of making a superior human and now we know today his idea of a superior human was very racist and misogynist so he believed that only white men and if they breaded with a white healthy woman that that was the only type of human that were good to breed and they wanted to try to get all of the negative they saw people that were inferior people that were not the male white whether Francis Glonton felt but if the person was Slavic, if they had a disability if they were not that what Francis Glonton said he would try to say we need to pull their genes out of the gene pool and so he promoted a bunch of policies that would sterilize people with disabilities so that they could not have children and the rise of institutionalization of people was intellectual developmental disabilities and the science became very famous it became really popular in the US and then a young Austrian fellow named Adolf Hitler got interested in it as well in the 1920s and said I'm going to take this back to the Deutschland and that's how you get the German euthanasia program got the gas chambers started is because of the American eugenics movement was so popular in the 1920s that the Nazis used it for their use in the Asia program which was a program that the Nazis would take people with disabilities that were in institutions they would make them go into a shower and they killed them with gas and it's really sad they called it mercy killing and it was all based off of this idea of eugenics that these people need to be weeded out of the gene pool we got to get rid of these people so that only the pure blood people can produce and we would only have pure blood people in the human population gene pool and not the defectives and I'm using quotations because I don't believe in any of this this is just the history and so since so because of that there were a lot of institutionalization even people that were my level functioning were put in these institutions there was a court case about a woman that she got the Supreme Court ordered her to be sterilized because she had a child so she was born of a person with a disability and she ended up having a disability and they were in the institution together and then she had a kid and the institution people didn't like that and so they made this fancy court case to try to get um professional sterilization done to a lot of people with intellectual or developmental disabilities and it basically needed that they couldn't have children and so that's the people here today that they didn't know that they were sterilized but they found out later in life and they were very upset that they're right to produce reproduce what's taken away and it was a lot to have to do because of the eugenics movement we were isolated and segregated we need to be hidden and criminalized too because a lot of the old documents that talk about this they would refer to the people with disabilities that were in institutions as inmates as prisoners they didn't see them as people that just needed support and help they saw us as a nuisance and there would be full articles talking about how intellectually disabled people at the time they used the word full mindedness were a nuisance, they were criminals they were just going to bring more crime to your town you don't want them if we put them in these institutions and we make sure they don't reproduce then it will be all good and you don't have to worry about it and we would just keep these hardly criminals away and so that's why a lot of us we were institutionalized for a long time but in the future there were organizations that actually helped to end that and the disability civil rights movement led to and a lot of other civil rights movements in the 1960s led to starting to de-identitialize people with disabilities putting things in the community so that people with disabilities could start getting support in the community and not in institutions and the eugenics movement lost favor in the 1940s after World War II after the holocaust was discovered and all the evidence was discovered of what Hitler was doing and they realized we probably shouldn't be doing that over here anymore because if the Nazis are doing it we better stop be doing it so we started to stop sterilizing people in the 1950s to 60s there are still states that they didn't stop until the 80s which is ridiculous but it did happen and this is a frustration and it really it caused an inclusion barrier because you had these people that were in the institutions for most of their lives and they were taught that they were mentally children that when they came out it was really hard to adjust and so there were things that they they had to learn and there was troubles at first because there were people that they would get lost there wasn't enough support and that's even today we asked in Washington and I'm sorry to say this but our state kind of sucks for this we have four institutions still running in Washington that put people with intellectual disabilities away and one of them actually got in serious trouble we hoped would get in serious trouble because they violated they had 40,000 violations on the CMS violations and they still didn't get shut down even though people first and all these other self advocacy organizations we were working with DRW and all of these places to try and come on, come on they have 40,000 violations why can't we shut this place down the argument was oh but there's still people that need to be segregated because there's not enough funding in the community well however if you shut down an institution and you take all that funding that's like millions of dollars that's in the institution and put in the community why don't you do that that's what we should be doing thank you and that's something that I'm fighting for I'm fighting to get those institutions closed down and so are other self advocacy groups that are part of, we've been working hard but it's still a struggle in our state and the thing is though other states have been able to shut them down so Washington, I don't see any excuses for this Alaska was gloating at us for well we got them shut down I'm like yeah so these are just some of the organizations that I've even met with worked with that have been really helpful for the disability community and the people first of Washington, they were great organizations that were really in the forefront of the disability rights movement and they're really all about helping intellectually disabled adults advocate for ourselves and build community and work in the community and so it's a really great organization and they're really about people first and our disabilities are secondary and they're all about closing down those darn institutions they've been wanting to get them closed down the ARC which actually used to be a parent group that was started in 1930s their name used to be the association of retarded children but then it was renamed to the association of retarded citizens and I want to say that because the thing is even though they had that name they had the right attitude they didn't want people in the institutions they were the parents that were like well we want to be able to take care of our kid and get funding to be able to do that and support and so they really advocated for that and then when the 1960s came out and we started seeing a growth of self-advocates they really took that on and were like yes, self-advocates we need more people like that nothing about us without us and so the ARC really tried to take on that message of supporting people with intellectual disabilities and they had the right attitude even though they had that name that's from the past and even with that they changed it it's not an acronym anymore now it's just the ARC it's no acronym I like to create an acronym for the association of remarkable people remarkable citizens that's what I like to call it another organization and I absolutely love the ARC and I've actually been an intern for the ARC of Keats County and they really taught me a lot about advocacy here in Washington really helped me get into community advocacy so I'm really grateful to them Special Olympics they provided a lot of recreational and sports opportunities for people with intellectual developmental disabilities and they've also been really promoting this inclusive model of hey, you know you want to play sports with everybody else we're going to try to help you do that with unified sports which is a program that has people with disabilities and without disabilities playing together and they're really trying to promote that in the schools and the history of the organization they said it was founded by Eunice Kennedy Shriver she was related to the Kennedys and they had a her brother had a sister that had an intellectual disability and I think that's really what sparked her passion for creating it originally it was a camp it was a sports camp because he saw that we didn't really have any sports opportunities so she provided that for intellectually disabled people and boy do I love it I absolutely love Special Olympics and in the past yes it was more segregated but I mean that kind of was the times and as times move and as things progress they change their model we should be including our athletes and our leadership and having their input be first so they really started taking that on and created Project Unified which was about trying to bring inclusion in the schools to be able to play on the same teams as everyone else and that's just something really big on and also they're really big on athlete leadership I'm actually an athlete ambassador for Special Olympics for Special Olympics Washington and I do leadership events with them I'm part of the Athlete Input Council and Women's Sports Committee and I absolutely love my time there and they really want to take in all input so that is one reason why I put them on the list is they really started listening to ID people and say you guys are the forefront of this and not able by people so I think that's really great and now they're actually helping athletes become coaches and in other positions like officials and referees even so it's really cool so anyone is in Special Olympics and they're interested in that yeah check it out it's really cool and self advocates being empowered this is a national self advocacy group I put them up because I met them in Washington DC and they have regions all around the country and they do national legislative advocacy and work on the national issues around disability policy self advocates and leadership that's actually a group I'm part of and they meet CTAC every second Tuesday of the month and they are a really great group but they are made up of self advocates and we work on legislative advocacy here in Washington state and we concentrate on the legislation and policy advocacy here and so we're actually working on some bills right now talking about how do we how do we shut down the institutions and they work with legislators on that getting rid of the sub-minimum wage a bunch of bills that try to pass that would replace the accessible parking placards with just the still person in a wheelchair to a more active person in a wheelchair kind of shows that we're active in our lives we're not just sitting there we're active so that's some of the things that they're working on the UACD in the LEND is a I'm part of the LEND the University of Washington LEND I was actually the first advocate fellow last year and it's basically a training program for medical professionals to work on policy and leadership positions helping families that are affected by intellectual and developmental disabilities and so they work on a lot of policy and we look at the medical aspects of the developmental disabilities and you know we help screen and they help screen children and help families with the process and so this last year they were really excited to have an advocate fellow a person with a developmental disability to you know represent our side and they really liked what I did and so they asked me all to stay again at the senior advocate fellow and the LEND is under the AUCD which is the Association of University Centers of Disability and it was a program that was created by the Kennedys which helps create funding for screenings for developmental disabilities funding for diagnostic research and research on disability and policy so it's a really great organization and they do a lot of national work as well I got to go to the disability policy seminar last year and got to talk to our state legislators in Washington D.C. federal legislators in Washington D.C. with the LEND and it was really cool and great and that's my passion is giving them the message that we want equal violence and we want pride, we don't want this negativity that sometimes the medical community likes to throw out the doctors and say oh we got to give the parents the bad news it's like don't give them bad news give them like your child's a blessing they're just uniquely different it's different news, it's not bad news and that's kind of one thing I tried to express to them because sometimes I'm about disability pride it's cool being disabled so there's an organization that I wanted to show you these are just some laws that have helped bring inclusion to people with disabilities the ADA the Olmstead Decision helped with the accessible housing and helping people with disabilities have more access to their communities IDEA was used to help have access to educations because before there were people with disabilities that would be put in separate schools or specialized schools instead of being able to just go to the school in their local community they were separate to these special schools IDEA stopped that and said no you have to be able to allow the child to have their education in your local communities and be able to just go to their regular high school or any elementary school whatever Rosa's law was a law that it changed the language it got rid of the word mental retardation and all the federal and state paperwork and replaced it with intellectual disability which for me I look at that law and I say well I'm more focused on the attitude because I don't want to have to make another law like this we didn't have to make another law like this but it's good that we did when we did the ABLE Act was a law that helped people with disabilities that use SSI which is social security insurance SSI disability which basically people with disabilities that can't work they get before you could only save up to $2,000 a month and you couldn't save and so people were kind of forced to live in poverty because they weren't allowed to save their money and this kind of helps fix that is so that people that use SSI can have saving accounts in their name and be able to save their money for future things like a house or gaining the higher education or those kind of things that just makes it fulfill their lives better and get them out of poverty so do you have any questions or comments I have a question about the mental disorder if there's people who is learning disability and autism they can work with them there's people who they saw killing somebody or you should be open and you just work with them to help them out mm-hmm um without a question it's like a question to you why you don't work with them instead of causing it work with the institutions the mental institutions in Washington that you've been talking about why you don't work with them instead of causing it well they don't really want us working with them so self-advocacy groups have tried that to try to say can we try to reason with you and the institutions have not really been responsive to that and also they kind of they don't think that we they feel that honestly part of that I don't know why they don't want to work with us but also I think of it this way if you live in an institution there's a lot of freedoms you don't have you can't go out by yourself at night me as an adult I can at night if I wanna go and have a night walk I can just walk out my front door nobody's gonna say a thing for a person with a disability living in an institution they don't have that freedom the personal freedom that I don't believe is right I think that people with disabilities have the same respect and rights and freedom as everyone else and that is why I'm very passionate about starting out in institutions I lived in an institutional orphanage for the first five and a half years of my life and I didn't have any freedom I didn't play when I wanted to play everything was structured you had to have your meal at a certain time you had to get embedded at certain time you had to do all these things at a certain time so that it's easier on the staff the problem with that it takes away people's freedom to choose when they wanna eat when they wanna get up in the morning all these things that other adults we have some choices, we have some freedoms in people that are putting these institutions they don't have and I don't think that's right you shouldn't be imprisoned just because of the way that you were born that is my message with why I want to set down the institutions any other questions? yeah thank you so much for sharing about what a true inclusion looks like and you talk a lot around this and the history of how the inclusion has created an inclusive environment here I know there's some things around policy you talk a lot around attitudes and then what are some things because I know you've broken down barriers of ways that really separates us by then including us so what are further ways that as students as faculty and staff here to create a true inclusive environment around how do we include that so my thing was that if you meet a person with a disability just see them as any other person respect them as you would respect any other person like if you're confused about something if they look like they need help with something just ask them do you need help with something because that actually really helps me if I'm on campus and I'm lost or if I'm confused about something for me it's really helpful when other people are like I see that you seem distressed do you need any help with anything that really helps me and you know I'm able to say yeah I need to get to this building and people are willing to help and you know if we can we have centers and everything is just more inclusive in the way we support people and just you know if people just need you know sometimes people with disabilities need to be explained something differently like instead of verbally telling somebody something maybe somebody needs to have it written down for them to understand and so just thinking about the different ways people communicate and understand that you know some people they may speak really loudly but they're speaking really loudly and so just being aware that everyone has different communication differences and they express their sadness and emotions differently and so just you know not looking down at somebody for you know if they're not giving you eye contact or you know their body language seems off you know like just you know accepting them as a person and not seeing you know thinking oh that person looks suspicious to accept them yeah well we had about three minutes left and so I just kind of wanted to maybe have you end on a follow up to Nora's question because I know you and I have had conversations so do you want to just kind of end by talking about your college experience and when it was that you really felt included in part of that campus at Central? yeah well when I first got to Central Washington University I was really lonely nobody really wanted to sit by me I always sat by myself at lunch and there were times you know I would cry like I was just so lonely but they did not really help me with getting into clubs getting into meeting with other students I started going you know one day I was walking around the student union and I saw this office area and it was called the CDSJ the Center for Diversity and Social Justice and I was like oh that's interesting and I just walked in there and you know they had these nice couches and it just looked really inviting and warm and people came up to me like oh hi welcome how are you and it was really welcoming and really like hey you want to hang out here you know you're totally welcome to hang out here anytime you want if you want to have dinner here or have lunch you're totally welcome and they would just talk to me and they just you know it's like how you know how did you get here you know like if I needed help with homework I was able to go there and get help and you know there's just really kind people and anytime I was like confused about what they said like I would be looking at their books and I'd be like what is this book about what is this book about you know like they really accepted my questions and they were really the answer to them and you know I built my friendships through that center and you know I found a disability student through the called ABLE which I got involved with that group and I made a lot of friends through that so most of my friends at Central are through because I went to the the clubs I went and just met with different people that were involved in the school government and stuff and that really helped and those people were just really welcoming to people you know how is your day and just like you know don't you know like oh I'm too busy for you you know like just be welcoming like that's the best thing you can do is just make people feel wanted yeah any other questions well thank you for your time