This week, we’re taking a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programming to share a special virtual discussion hosted by The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of the new Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. Off-Kilter previewed the collaborative’s launch a few weeks ago in a special behind-the-scenes episode with TCF’s new Disability Economic Justice team: it brings together two dozen leading disability groups, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and finally break the link between disability and poverty that continues to persist in the United States more than three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law.
For more:
- Here’s the new TCF–CEPR study documenting the economic crisis facing the U.S. disability community (and if that’s tl;dr, here’s a fact sheet).
- Check out the new TCF–Data for Progress poll finding that just one in three disabled voters believe leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities.
Here’s the press release announcing the collaborative: you can find the full event and all the materials discussed during it at DEJC.org.
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REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by The Century Foundation. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week we’re taking a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programing to share a special virtual discussion hosted at The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of what’s called the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
We previewed the Collaborative launch a few weeks ago in a special behind-the-scenes episode with The Century Foundation’s new Disability Economic Justice team, and it brings together two dozen leading disability groups, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and finally break the link between disability and poverty that continues to persist in the U.S. more than three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. You can find the full event and all the materials discussed during it at DEJCo.org. Let’s take a listen. [upbeat music break]
Welcome everyone. And on behalf of The Century Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and all of the Collaborative’s founding members, thank you all so much for joining us today for the official launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
My name is Rebecca Vallas. I’m a senior fellow here at The Century Foundation, where I’m proud to lead TCF’s Disability Economic Justice team, which officially launched in March of this year with the amazing Kim Knackstedt and Vilissa Thompson, whom you’ll get to hear from later during today’s event. It’s my distinct honor and privilege to serve as your emcee during today’s virtual event.
A few quick housekeeping notes before we get to the good stuff. We’d love for all of you to participate in today’s event by using the chat function. And our hope is, time permitting, to have a little time for questions at the end of the closing panel. You can also join us on Twitter by following @DEJCollab—that’s C O L L AB—and you can use the hashtag #DisabilityEconomicJustice to join the conversation as well. And finally, today’s event has an ASL interpreter pinned to the screen, as well as live captioning. If anyone experiences any problems with either of those, please send a message to the hosts in the chat so we can get that sorted out. And thank you to our interpreters and to our captioner for being with us today.
As a new report released today by The Century Foundation and the Center for Economic Policy Research finds, America’s disability community is facing a persistent economic crisis, an economic crisis that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 31 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, became law, people with disabilities in the United States still face poverty rates twice as high as non-disabled people and were paid just 74 cents for every dollar paid to non-disabled workers in 2020 due to pervasive discrimination and a litany of structural barriers that continue to stand in the way of economic security and upward mobility for disabled people in this country today.
Disabled people of color in the U.S. face even greater economic disparities and rates of poverty and hardship due to the compounding effects of structural as well as cultural ableism and racism. In just one example, the poverty rate among Black disabled adults was 28 percent in 2019, fully 10 percentage points higher than for white disabled adults.
Many of the persistent barriers to economic security facing Americans with disabilities are the result of policy failures that become visible when we center the perspectives and experiences of the disability community from inadequate affordable, accessible housing and transportation to a long history of disinvestment in community living supports and much, much more.
But despite the fact that 61 million, or more than one in four, U.S. adults live with disabilities in this country—numbers that are rapidly rising as the COVID-19 pandemic has already been the largest mass disabling event in modern history—to date, economic policy conversations in this country have rarely included a disability lens. People with disabilities have generally been an afterthought in our economic policymaking, much less at the table.
Now, new polling released today by The Century Foundation and another of our terrific partners in the Collaborative, Data for Progress, underscores how left behind the disability community feels after decades of being sidelined. Just one in three disabled voters—one in three—feel that leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities. Finally achieving disability economic justice in this country will require not only a redoubling of our national commitment to the unfulfilled goals of the ADA, but also a collective commitment to applying disability as a lens across the entire economic policy agenda, and an intentional acknowledgment that we will never achieve true economic justice in this nation if we fail to achieve economic justice for disabled people.
And that right there is the vision of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. A first of its kind initiative, it brings together two dozen leading disability organizations, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and drive a disability economic justice agenda.
In 2022, nearly 32 years after the ADA was signed into law, disability and poverty should not go hand in hand, and we can no longer afford to acknowledge the “unfinished business”—I put that in scare quotes—of the ADA once a year on its anniversary in July. Achieving long denied economic justice for disabled people in the U.S. will require centering the perspectives and expertise of disabled people across all of the nation’s economic policymaking. And I’m incredibly excited and humbled to work alongside the diverse array of remarkable policy leaders who make up the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative to finally make that a reality. You can find a full list of the founding members at DEJC.org.
Finally, a huge thanks to the Ford Foundation for being such an incredible partner and to everyone at The Century Foundation, especially our president Mark Zuckerman, whom we’ll be hearing from shortly, for TCF’s phenomenal commitment to this work.
And with that, I have the great pleasure of introducing our panel of distinguished guests, our first panel for today’s event, and welcoming them to the virtual stage, along with one of my very favorite co-conspirators and my co-moderator for our opening session, Rebecca Cokley of the Ford Foundation, whom I had the honor of founding the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress years ago, when we were the law firm of Vallas and Cokley, as many folks may remember. She now serves as the first ever program officer for U.S. disability rights at the Ford Foundation. Hi, Cokley. Come on stage.
We are also honored to have two incredible leaders who have, in many ways, paved the way for the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s very existence with us today as well, and I’m gonna welcome them to the virtual stage too. Julián Castro is the former Secretary of Housing & Urban Development under President Barack Obama. He now serves as the Klinsky Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress at Harvard Law School. Secretary Castro, thank you so much for being with us today.
SECRETARY JULIÁN CASTRO: Wonderful to be with you. Thanks for the invitation.
VALLAS: And Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who represents the 7th District of Massachusetts and really needs no introduction to the disability community because she’s become such an incredible leader, champion, and friend to the community. Congresswoman, thank you so much for being with us today as well.
REPRESENTATIVE AYANNA PRESSLEY: Great to be with you both. Well, with everyone! [laughs]
VALLAS: Well, and Cokley, it’s wonderful to get to share the virtual stage with you. We don’t spend nearly enough time together these days. I miss you. I miss being down the hall from you. But I’m gonna give you moderator’s privilege to ask the first question of our distinguished panel.
REBECCA COKLEY: Thank you so much, Vallas. So, distinguished panel members and friends, the disability community calls those that grew up at the nexus of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act the ADA generation: people who grew up with different expectations for disabled people around what access to school looks like, access to work, to health care, to society. We are now more than 30 years past the ADA, and we have a whole new generation of people with disabilities that have been created as a result of this pandemic and a whole generation of people with disabilities that have been impacted by the pandemic. But yet, every year, when we mark the anniversary of the ADA, folks are still being told, “Well, we still have this much further to go. There are still unmet goals.” We’re facing an economic crisis for disabled Americans, and we were still well before this pandemic. So, how do we ensure that we don’t go another 30 years only talking about the fight for disabled Americans and their families in July as the continued unfinished business?
VALLAS: And I think that’s a great question for both of you. Yeah.
COKLEY: Representative Pressley, do you wanna start? [laughs]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. Again, just wonderful to be with all of you. This is a long time coming and a historic moment. One moment while I digress and just say that I am a Black woman with a bald head, wearing a black blouse and pink lipstick and pearl hoop earrings. Okay.
Cokley, you’re exactly right. The disability community in America has faced systemic disenfranchisement in the form of policy violence really for generations, from unconscionable barriers to health care to income limits for those seeking accessible housing to barriers to marry whom you love. And my mother, may she rest in peace and power, told me often that to be born Black in America was to be born into struggle. And I extend that sentiment to those in the disability community as well. Daily, you are navigating and organizing for your humanity, even if you’re not an activist per se. And while there is certainly beauty in the struggle, when I think about a generation, when I think about the world we’re trying to create for our children, I dream of a life where they are defined by their joy and their freedom, and they are navigating a markedly more accessible world in every single sense.
And the COVID pandemic, you know, I forget who said it, Cokley, but there is that expression that, “We are not makers of history; we are shaped by it.” And so, we are, in this moment, the pandemic is shaping us, and it has really laid bare these pre-existing deep inequities and disparities, exacerbated them, and our community has experienced so many deep and painful losses. And policy, it’s my love language, and I fundamentally believe that in this moment, we must act with responsive policy as this pandemic is shaping us. And it has to be crafted in close proximity with those closest to the pain. The disability community, marginalized communities have been victimized and bore the burden of policy violence. We have been precise in that depression and oppression. I think we can legislate justice and healing in the same way that we have legislated marginalization. And again, for generations, policy has been used in that very exact way to advance discrimination.
And so, in this moment, we have to be just as precise in advancing policy that heals and advances, and we can’t shy away from governing moments. One way that we as folks, I think, in public life and in public office and as legislators, need to move to advance the promise of true disability justice is we have to push back against these unjust, false, binary choices. So often our community is asked to moderate our aspirations and ask for less or where we’re pitted against other marginalized communities. And what we need, I just reject the premise of these unjust binary choices. It’s money for Home and Community-Based Services and critical SSI reform. It’s housing justice that centers the disability community and free public transit that is accessible. It’s a federal jobs guarantee and addressing our broken criminal legal system. Our destinies are tied.
VALLAS: And Secretary Castro, same question to you. I think I will let you get in there as well.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. Well, first of all, let me say again to Rebecca, and Rebecca Cokley and Vallas, thank you so much for the invitation to be a part of this. To The Century Foundation and the Ford Foundation, congratulations on launching this collaborative. And it’s always a pleasure to be with Representative Pressley, who has been so inspiring to me and I know to so many others across our country. Thank you for participating.
I think that Representative Pressley said it very well that it’s past due that issues that touch upon the disability community receive greater attention, greater policy resources, a different way of looking at them, and also that we forge partnerships and allyships. And that’s why I’m so excited about this. I think your question was, how do we ensure that the next 32 years aren’t spent talking about unfinished business? One of the best ways that we can do that is to make sure that we forge these partnerships, forge these coalitions to get stronger and stronger in the political realm at every level: the federal level, of course, but also the state level and the local level.
I think about, just as one example, this moment that we’re in where Representative Pressley, Congress, and the President put forward a groundbreaking investment in infrastructure, and all of the decisions that are gonna be made in the coming months, years, and decades about how that money is spent and when that money is spent, whose lives it touches and impacts and boosts quality of life for and the role that policymakers, whether they come from the disability community or not, have in shaping inclusive investment in resources. I also think that this is something that is not only for the public sector to tackle, but also the private sector. And of course, y’all are setting a great example in the non-profit sector.
And sometimes I feel like in the progress that we need to make—and Representative Pressley, I think, touched on this as well—sometimes I feel like the biggest stumbling blocks are not only policy and politicians, but really, the culture that we live in. A culture that says that mental health issues are not the same as physical health issues. A culture that devalues the experience of people living with disabilities. A culture that too oftentimes is perfectly fine stigmatizing people with disabilities, laughing about people with disabilities in different ways. And that all of us as individuals, as human beings, and also in our roles, from people in Hollywood to people in the corridors, of course, of Congress, and on corporate boards have a responsibility to change that culture so that as that culture changes, we can make even bigger changes in policy and investment in resources. That’s what I look forward to, at least hope for, in the coming years.
VALLAS: Well, and Secretary Castro, I wanna stay with you for a moment because in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, for the first time in American political history, nearly, excuse me, every single Democratic candidate for president, every single one, released a disability plan during the primary campaign. And that was a particularly significant moment in American political history for the community. This was not something we had ever seen happen. And your proposal, your campaign plan was really one of the anchors of that primary season, really making important progress towards helping people understand that every issue was a disability issue. How do we move from campaign promises to finally achieving disability economic justice so that this economy finally works for disabled people?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. I was so happy to see the level of focus among the various Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 on justice for people with disabilities. And I think that that…hopefully, the work of all of those candidates serves as a blueprint for not only candidates, but most importantly, elected officials going forward. I know that it’s a part of the party platform, some of that is part of the party platforms, especially the Democratic Party, which is encouraging. To move on to the next level, the next phase of that, I think that it’s gonna take the whole gamut of how things change in a democracy. It’s gonna take the kind of partnerships that y’all are forging today and going forward. It’s gonna take all of the on-the-ground activism that is out there in local communities, in state legislatures, and in Washington, D.C.
And I think in this moment—and Representative Pressley referenced this as well—we’re in this very different moment for America still, as we work our way, hopefully toward the end of this pandemic, where I feel like everybody should have this sense that we’re all in this together. In their head must be implanted more of a sense of that at least than we were feeling three years ago, before this pandemic. And in that, you have an opportunity to move people’s hearts and minds to support changes to policy that affect the most vulnerable, that boost their quality of life and their economic mobility more than we have in decades. And so, I would just say that it’s gonna take all of that on-the-ground activism at every level.
It’s also not just on the disability community. This is really on all of us—and I speak about elected officials here—to go above and beyond your comfort zone oftentimes, to understand, to learn about, to challenge the notions even that you have sometimes, to educate yourself, and then to delve into the policy of it. And so, I think all of that, if we do those things, then we can see that those policy prescriptions actually become reality.
The last thing I’ll say is, of course, we’re dealing in a political environment, right, that is gonna dictate our ability to get a lot of these things done in the future. And I wish that I could say that we have two parties that are equally concerned about the concerns of the disability community. We have to work on both parties because the fact is that—everybody knows here this better than I do, that—people with disabilities come from every community and every ideology, every walk of life, in every state, red and blue. And that provides a hope that we can make progress even in the midst of a very polarized political situation in Washington. And I’m even more confident because of champions like Representative Pressley that I know are always there pressing the case, trying to make progress, trying to convince their colleagues on both sides of the aisle. That’s what we need.
VALLAS: And I should note that there is immense bipartisanship among voters when it comes to disability economic justice priorities. And that new polling I referenced before from The Century Foundation and Data for Progress just out today doesn’t just find that people with disabilities are feeling left behind, it also finds that there is immense widespread bipartisan support for all kinds of disability economic justice priorities. We just haven’t, as you’re noting, seen quite that level of support within the halls of power. So, just note to policymakers that the support is there among your voters on both sides. Cokley, do you wanna take the next question to Congresswoman Pressley?
COKLEY: Definitely. Congresswoman, I go back to actually, I can actually remember the day it was when our teams met up, when I was still at the Center for American Progress. And it was the day that your video dropped on The Root. And I remember sitting in the lobby of your office and watching the staff completely all abuzz with the responses coming in to the video where you discussed living with alopecia, and it was so ironic that we were sitting in that lobby waiting to meet with your team that day. And watching the response, watching the community welcome you with open arms was quite honestly one of the coolest moments and one of the moments that I was proudest of for my community. I mean, we had plotted all along. We’re like, statistically, someone in The Squad has to be a person with a disability. And I will say all along I was like, “I really hope it’s AP. I hope she’s ours.”
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: [laughs]
COKLEY: You know, we have our drafts. That’s how it works. And it was revolutionary the way that you self-identified as part of the community and the way that you have taken on meeting and engaging with the community in a really new way. You often talk about how policy is your love language, and I think one of the things that’s been really cool about the way that you and your team work is that you don’t see disability as like a short bus issue. It’s not just like, “This is the disability policy, and this is everything else.” The team is constantly thinking—I know your head is constantly thinking—about what are the disability issues around low-income housing? What are the disability issues in carceral reform? Can you talk a little bit about how you have built that mindset into how you craft policy?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. First, I do just wanna take a moment to offer some verbal flowers and effusive praise for Secretary Castro. Never take his leadership for granted. This is someone who moves with authenticity and intention in all things that he does. And so, we thank him for his leadership and being a pacesetter in this space. And it’s wonderful to be at this virtual table with him and to partner with him on so many issues.
I do wanna back up a little bit in terms of sort of how I come to this work and what has made me move with intention when it comes to bringing a disability lens to every issue. Prior to my election to Congress, where I’ve had the honor of serving for a little over three years now, I served on the Boston City Council. And although transportation is not a municipal issue per se—in terms of funding, it’s a state issue—it was an issue that I was leaning in on because transit justice is really at the intersect of every other issue. And I went to a member of the disability community, a disability justice advocate, and I asked to ride public transit with her. And a ride that should have taken 30 minutes took almost two hours, and it was because the elevators were broken and a host of other infrastructure failures, policy failures, budgetary, moral failures. And at the end of that commute, I cried openly. And I’m getting emotional thinking about it now because I felt such shame that members of my community that I had not seen were being relegated to second class citizenship and that these were civil rights violations happening in plain view. And that I had not been as intentional and inclusive in my movement building and my policy advocacy.
And so, that shifted a lot of things for me around making sure that I’m proximate so that I better understand the intersectionalities, the complexities, the nuances, the various identities. As a voter, I hate when an elected official single-issues me. And you know, we have to ask more of ourselves and of those who represent us. You can’t just come to Black America and talk about mass incarceration or come to the disability community and only talk about the ADA or come to the LGBTQA community and at the time, maybe you have spoken about marriage equality or trans rights, or the Latino community and just talk about immigration, or women and only talk about bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. We live in intersectionality, and I think for too long, the disability community and disability policy has really been treated as an add-on or an afterthought.
Again, when the reality is, if we take an intersectional approach to policymaking, disability and other aspects of identity and the way people show up in the world is really central, you know. The policy should be responsive to the needs of the people, and people have multiple identities. And so, we have to start with those who are marginalized, start with those who’ve been made vulnerable, start with those who’ve been sidelined, systematically left out of the conversation.
And then I’ll close here, Cokley, to your point about our carceral system. The other thing that matters is storytelling and narrative and discourse because that shapes policy. So, I can’t talk about intervening to ensure that a 15-year-old child in Michigan who would’ve been incarcerated during the pandemic for not participating in remote learning, I’m not going to erase out of her narrative that she is a member of the disability community, and that was a core part of her story and her lived experience. When we see the latest iteration of a iteration of police violence and brutality with a Black man, and we don’t, I tell the story that he is disabled, when we erase that from the storytelling, from the narrative, from the discourse, then that also doesn’t show up in our policymaking and in our advocacy. And so, we have to make plain how systems are intersect, fit, and overlap and marginalized and how policy is not a dusty book on a shelf. It’s not static. Policy is the difference, quite literally, between who lives and who dies and who thrives. So, I think it begins with being in proximity, bringing that lens to everything, and then in the storytelling and the narrative, which shapes the discourse, just understanding that we have to be inclusive in that and not erase out disability identity for many of these other marginalized experiences and injustices.
VALLAS: Congresswoman, I get chills every time you get talking about these issues. And we’ve got just a few minutes left, but I wanna stay with you. And then Secretary Castro, you’re gonna bring us home, so get ready. Congresswoman Pressley, so far, we’ve been discussing the unfinished business of the ADA, the importance of bringing a disability lens across all of our policymaking, especially our economic policymaking. But right now, this moment when we’re having this virtual discussion, this isn’t just any other year where we’re talking about the unfinished business of the ADA, right?
We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, much as many people are not acting that way. And we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has already yielded the largest mass disabling event in many of our lifetimes. And that’s due to, of course, long COVID. Congresswoman Pressley, you have been such a leader on this issue. You’ve been speaking out on behalf of folks with long COVID and elevating their voices. And people with disabilities across this country, including many folks with long COVID, are really feeling left behind, as we saw in that polling, but as we know through so many other means as well. How can leaders respond in this moment, this mass disabling prompt event, to finally listen to and hear and engage with disabled people instead of, as you’ve noted, allowing folks to be ignored and erased and shut out as they historically have been?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah. Well, I ran for office because I wanted to champion the needs of those that are historically ignored, left out, and left behind. And as I moved in and out of community and paid attention to organizing that was happening online, it was clear to me that the long hauler community was being left behind, and I wanted to make sure that it was not being ignored when it comes to our public health response. And the disability community, many advocates, including who’s with us today, said at the outset of the pandemic that this had the potential to be a mass disabling event. And so, it is certainly devastating to see that coming to pass. And it makes the case for everything from Home and Community-Based Services to paid leave. I can argue Medicare for All. I certainly think it makes the case for that. And I want those that’ve been struggling with long COVID, who have been told that their symptoms and experiences are imaginary, that what they have experienced is real, it is as real as they are. It is deserving and warrants a federal response. We have conservative estimates that the long hauler community could be as many as eight million people, and those are conservative estimates because we don’t have the data, which is something that I continue to push for.
But I’ve introduced legislation to meet the needs of long haulers, to have a federal response, to expand long COVID clinics through our health care providers who are providing those who have met the needs of the most marginalized, like our community health centers, to provide them with grants to ensure that anyone who’s struggling with these debilitating symptoms, which is grossly affecting one’s physical health and quality of life and our workforce, that they’re able to access the health care that they need in community. And so, I’m just gonna keep banging the drum on that. And again, I thank our leaders on the Disability Justice Committee for being the canaries in the coal mine early on, on that.
So, but I think at the end of the day, it’s time, as we move forward, that we can get away from these cruel and dated policies like the marriage penalty and imagine what would happen if we fully funded the IDEA. Even the best intended elected officials need to be held accountable. And in my view, daily, we need to organize to press for our full humanity to be recognized, for our rights to be codified in law, and moreover, implemented and funded. So, I’m not fighting for scraps. I’m fighting for liberation. And that is what is beautiful about this space that you have all came together. And I’m just honored to be a part of this collaborative.
VALLAS: I might have to steal that as the tagline for the Collaborative: “We’re not fighting for scraps. We’re fighting for liberation.” Thank you, Congresswoman Pressley for that.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let’s go! I’ll buy the first T-shirt! [laughs] Let’s go! Let’s go!
COKLEY: I was gonna say it’s time for some swag.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah! [laughs]
COKLEY: We need some swag with that on there.
Mr. Secretary, to take us home, I wanna pose that question to you. I think one of the things when I think about your campaign that was so historic was quite literally the day the plan dropped. A, you did something that only one other candidate did. You picked up the phone, and you called the people that worked on the plan. And you thanked them. And I remember I got a phone call from (210), and I didn’t answer it because my ex-best friend is from San Antonio. And I was like, “Why is this chick calling me?!” And then your team texted and were like, “Cokley, answer the phone. It’s the Secretary.” And I answered it, and you said, “Thank you.” And it blew me away. And then it was, “Now we wanna do a Twitter chat. Can we pull something together in 24 hours?” And it was like, “Give us 48! We can do it in 48.”
And I think one of the things that you and your team were so great about was getting to the community where they were, reaching out to the community and saying, hey, we’re not doing rallies. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Let me go to where disabled people are. Let me hop on Twitter. Let’s do something. Let’s pull in the Crip The Vote folks. Let’s actually have this really phenomenal conversation with Sandy Ho, you know? And that’s not typical, unfortunately. We recently found that only one in three disabled voters feel that their leaders in Washington care about the community. How can leaders respond in this moment, this historic mass disabling event, to finally listen to, respond, and engage with disabled people instead of sort of perpetuating the ongoing erasure that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about today?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Well, thanks for your kind words, Rebecca. I think that it starts with approaching public service as a public servant, as one who is there to serve others, to listen to others, to learn from others. I feel like, and don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of folks that do, including, of course, Representative Pressley do that. But I think that too oftentimes as politicians, we get caught up in another mode, which is a mode of dictating or assuming that we know what’s best. Or sometimes to give folks the benefit of the doubt, they’re so busy tackling different issues that they don’t pause enough to listen and to understand that the lived experiences of the people who, even if they have a heart to serve them, are so important to try and get to understand and to let that lead.
And that’s what we were trying to do in the campaign with how we approached our policy. It’s also, I think, the approach that some of the other candidates took and many elected officials do take right now. We need more of that. We need more people in policymaking and in the private sector who are in a position to make a difference to approach things in that way. I think that we also need to, again, seize this moment that we’re in, where we have more people in our country who are willing to look out for their neighbor to try and be inclusive, people just at an everyday level because of what we’ve just been through and seize that opportunity to forge partnerships, forge coalitions, push that on-the-ground activism, and make change happen.
One of my most unforgettable moments from when I was HUD Secretary was sitting in the audience in March of 2015 in Selma, Alabama as President Obama and the late Congressman John Lewis and others marked the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. And one of the things that President Obama said then about the civil rights movement that I think applies here is that there’s no denying that a lot of progress has been made. You know, 2015 was not 1965. But there’s also no denying that so much more has to be made. And so, to that unfinished business that we undoubtedly have, we need the hearts and minds and the hard work of people through all walks of life. And we need a reawakening of the needs of the disability community to thunder through the actions of people in power. That’s what I hope for.
VALLAS: I can’t think of better words to end this panel on. Secretary Castro, Congresswoman Pressley, thank you so, so, so much for being with us this morning to kick off this Collaborative, for your leadership, for your partnership, for being such friends of the community, and for being so wonderful to work with and having such fabulous staff. We have to give a shoutout to your incredible staff as well who are always there for us.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yes, Sarah Groh!
SECRETARY CASTRO: [chuckles]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let me just tell you, I’m just so very fortunate. But thank you all, and this was so special. And what an epic day, again, long time coming and looking forward to continuing to do the work of this unfinished business with you, Mr. Secretary.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Thank you.
VALLAS: Well, we look forward to working with both of you. So, we’re gonna send you off on your way and let you off the virtual stage. Rebecca Cokley, thank you so much for co-moderating this panel with me, for being in this work with us, and thank you to Ford as well. So, I think that’s all the time we’ve got for this panel right now.
But now it is my great pleasure to introduce my boss, Mark Zuckerman, president of The Century Foundation, who is gonna join us to share a little bit more about TCF’s incredible commitment to this work. Thank you so much, Mark, for being with us today, and take it away. The stage is yours.
MARK ZUCKERMAN: Thank you so much, Rebecca and Kim and Vilissa. I wanna say flat out that you three are the policy dream team doing Century and the community proud. So, thank you for everything that you’re doing. Now, welcome everyone. I’m so glad you could join us today. That was just an amazing conversation.
Today we build and honor really the work of a generation of advocates who came before us. For me, I worked for Congressman George Miller for many years and the remarkable Judy Heumann who grew up in a world where children with disabilities weren’t even permitted to attend public schools. They said that was wrong, and they made it right. So, yes, we’ve come a long way down the road, but we have miles and miles to go. That is the unfinished work of this effort that we’re launching today.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Century Foundation, we’re a progressive, independent think tank that drives policy change to improve people’s lives. We pursue economic, racial, gender, and now disability equity and justice for all people in the country, in education and in health care and in work. Our economic team at TCF has been doing remarkable work to build an economy that works for everyone. But we knew we were missing a critical piece of the economic justice work: the perspectives and experiences of 61 million people in this country with disabilities. We must ensure that the economy works for them, too. Right now, we are failing, and the economy is failing disabled people.
That’s why we are proud to announce the launch today of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, an effort that’s spearheaded by TCF’s very own Disability Economic Justice team. This work is so critical because it centers the unique perspectives and experiences of the disability community, enabling us here at Century and our collaborative partners to bring a disability-focused lens to all our work. Because, as you’ve heard from our opening panelists, every issue, every issue is a disability issue.
And of course, without our incredible partner, the Ford Foundation, this much needed work would not be possible. Our friends and colleagues at the Ford Foundation are leaders ensuring that disability rights are front and center in the philanthropy and non-profit world. The Ford Foundation is the first major philanthropy in the country to launch its own disability rights portfolio, and the wonderful Rebecca Cokley, who you’ve just heard from, is the first program officer to take the lead on this critical work.
I now have the pleasure to introduce Sarita Gupta, the vice president for U.S. Programs at the Ford Foundation, who can tell you more about Ford’s important work on disability rights and justice, and why the launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative couldn’t be coming at a more important time. Thank you so much for your leadership on this issue. And now I turn it over to you, Sarita.
SARITA GUPTA: Am I muted? Okay. Can you all hear me now? Perfect. Thank you, Mark and to the entire dream team at The Century Foundation for inviting Ford to join this exciting event today. I’m really thrilled to be here with you all. As a longtime workers’ rights and economic justice advocate, I have the privilege of working with some of you and others in the disability community to address a range of issues, including access to good quality jobs and fair wages and working conditions, and access to affordable long-term supports and services, and basically, the right to live and work with dignity, respect, and agency.
And even as I reflect on my years of work in the economic justice arena, it never felt like it was enough. We could always do so much more to really weave together and integrate the needs of the disability community and opportunities with the disability community in broader economic justice work, which is why this is so exciting; today is so exciting. It is long overdue for us to have such a collaborative where we can truly evolve and grow the work, support and deepen partnerships, and shift culture—as both Congresswoman Pressley and Secretary Castro named—and to meet the broad range of issues impacting the disability community. At the Ford Foundation, the U.S. disability rights work led by Rebecca Cokley is now part of our holistic U.S. programs portfolio, which is exciting and really a demonstration and expression of our growth and commitment to this work.
At the Ford Foundation, we believe in the inherent dignity of all people. Yet around the world, billions of people are excluded from full participation in the political, economic, and cultural systems that shape their lives. And we have learned over the last few years, in particular with leaders like Rebecca and others, the degree to which that exclusion has been experienced by people in the disability community. For us, we understand that disability and poverty are causes and consequences of each other, which is why the Ford Foundation, after much consultation from the disability community, is grounding our U.S. Disability Rights Program strategy in economic justice. There is no strategy that will be successful in eliminating poverty that fails to center disability. And so, to see the disability groups here at the table with our partners working to eradicate poverty is so exciting. This is a core goal of the work we’re trying to drive at Ford, and collaboratives like this can really serve as an example for how to truly weave a disability rights and justice-centric lens across any policy area.
Moving ahead, we need to continue to drive the message that people with disabilities are not just recipients of programs and services, but they’re also students, workers, contributors to the workforce and society. The need for support does not eliminate one’s power, one’s agency, one’s right to access the promises of the ADA for full participation, independent living, economic self-sufficiency, and equality of opportunity. I’m just thrilled and excited to be a part of this effort with all of you. Mark, I’m gonna turn it back over to you or to Rebecca. Thank you.
VALLAS: Thank you so much, Sarita. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are so lucky to have such an incredible partner in the Ford Foundation, and we are so grateful to everyone over there, you and to Rebecca Cokley and Darren Walker and everyone for your incredible partnership and support of this work. This truly, as Mark said, would not be happening if not for your partnership and support.
So, now I am thrilled to kick it over to our closing panel. And to do that, it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce my amazing colleagues on the Disability Economic Justice Team here at The Century Foundation. So, I’m gonna welcome them onto the virtual stage. They’re gonna be our co-moderators for this closing panel. Kim Knackstedt is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. She comes to us from the White House, where most recently, she served as the first-ever director of disability policy on the White House Domestic Policy Council, an exciting development in and of itself that that position was even created in the Biden administration. So, welcome Kim. And the amazing Vilissa Thompson, who also probably needs no introduction to this community. So thrilled to have Vilissa as a fellow here at The Century Foundation. Vilissa is the founder of Ramp Your Voice, among many other things, a licensed social worker, and really one of the preeminent thought leaders within the disability community at the intersection of race and gender.
Kim, Vilissa, I am so thrilled to bring you up to this stage to moderate our final panel, which features just a few of our phenomenal members of this collaborative: Micaela Connery, co-founder of The Kelsey; Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families; Mia Ives-Rublee, director of the Center for American Progress’s Disability Justice Initiative; Lisa McCorkell of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative; Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and last but certainly not least, Nancy Smith of Activating Change, which is a project at the Vera Institute of Justice. Kim, Vilissa, without further ado, I’m gonna hand it over to you, ladies, to bring us home.
VILISSA THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Rebecca, and thank you, everybody, for being here. This has been such an incredible event. As Rebecca said, my name’s Vilissa Thompson. I’m a fellow here at TCF, and I wanna give a visual description of myself before I pass it along to Kim. I am a light-skinned Black woman who is sitting in her wheelchair. I am wearing rectangle-shaped glasses. I have on a new color lip gloss. I’ve got on a long sleeve shirt, wearing silver hoop earrings, and my background is a sunny yellow.
KIM KNACKSTEDT: Okay. Thanks, Vilissa! This is Kim Knackstedt, and I’ll also give a visual description. I’m a blond woman with shoulder length hair. I’m wearing a white blazer with a black dress under it, and here in my office at TCF. I’m really, really excited to be here with you. I’ll send it back over to you, Vilissa, to kick us off.
THOMPSON: All right. So, in the interest of time, we wanted to hear from all of our amazing panelists. So, we’re just gonna to jump right in. If you have any questions, feel free to share them in the chat.
KNACKSTEDT: Perfect. So, our first question will go for you, Micaela. And again, Micaela’s with The Kelsey, and so feel free to tell us a little bit about that when you provide your answers. So, here’s our question, Micaela. Right now, just five percent of our federally funded affordable housing is required to be accessible. Accessible, affordable housing is critical to access to community and move out of segregated institutional settings. We delve into the barriers this presents to disabled Americans in the report released today, and a link to that report is in the chat. From your perspective, Micaela, in what ways must our national housing infrastructure change in order to increase economic opportunity and justice for people with disabilities?
MICAELA CONNERY: Thanks so much, Kim and Vilissa. I am Micaela Connery. I am a white woman with a brown ponytail, and my virtual background is a housing construction site in front of San Francisco’s City Hall with the logo The Kelsey. And The Kelsey is a San Francisco-based, not-for-profit advancing disability-forward housing solutions and also working to change the systems and policies so that those solutions can be possible at scale. And so, we are thrilled to be joining this Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, recognizing that access to housing is such an essential part of economic opportunity for all people, and especially for people with disabilities.
And Kim, to your question, for so many years, I think we’ve thought about two things as it comes to housing. We’ve thought about bare minimum code requirements, which we know is not even close to scratching the surface of the need. And we’ve really thought about housing that has been a slow iteration on the institutions that we worked so hard to close for so many years. And when the promise of Olmstead and Title II of the ADA came to fruition, we actually haven’t created the policy systems and funding mechanisms to realize that promise, to make that promise from right to reality.
And so, for us, we look at the fact that people with disabilities are more likely to face housing discrimination. They’re more likely to experience housing insecurity and cannot afford rent on SSI in a single U.S. market. Not a single city in the U.S. can you afford basic housing on SSI. These individuals are more likely to experience homelessness and more likely to experience housing insecurity as a result. And we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that a lack of access to affordable, accessible, inclusive housing had deathly consequences for people with disabilities who were forced to stay in congregate settings where they were more likely to contract COVID, or they were housing insecure or living in inadequate housing or cramped communities where they couldn’t even self-isolate or get the supports or services they needed while being forced to stay at home where they lived.
And so, this is, you know, Secretary Castro spoke: We have a real opportunity as we think about rebuilding our housing infrastructure in this moment in time to make sure building that housing infrastructure is inclusive of disabled individuals. And that actually, in doing so, we create better housing experiences for all people. We create housing that has deeper affordability, with better access to vouchers and better subsidies for extremely low-income and mixed-income housing. We create better access to Home and Community-Based Services that are housing-related services to make sure that people can find and retain and receive the services that they want in housing. Community-based housing isn’t limited to—I so appreciate the false binary—community-based housing isn’t something that’s only available to some people with disabilities. It is something, no matter what an individual’s support need is, they should be able to have the services and the housing access to live in the community of their choice.
And then those solutions look like things like increased leadership at HUD focused on housing for people with disabilities and increased leadership of disabled people within our state, federal, and local housing agencies and within our housing development and policy community. It includes policies like subsidies, vouchers, and access to incentives that support people to go beyond the minimum abhorrent code requirements that we need to make code. But that is a minimum. That is a floor. That is not what our goal should be. And we need incentives and funding mechanisms in our federal and state programs to support meeting that.
And we need to rethink what truly inclusive disability-forward housing looks like. We need to stop saying we’re gonna tweak the institution and just sort of make mini-institutions or build the same models that we’ve tried to end for years and go to proximal to individuals with disabilities and ask them, “What does housing look like? And how, if we created something from scratch, could we create those communities that meet that need?” So, we’re excited to do this work in partnership with this collaborative and our allies in this field.
KNACKSTEDT: Amazing. And I love how you said that it’s the floor, not the actual goal. I think that’s such a great way to put it, where so often that we think of it as that’s the goal versus the flipped way around. And we need to still raise that standard, even as is. So, really, really loved your answer there. Vilissa, I’ll turn it over to you for the next question.
THOMPSON: Great. So, our next panelist would be Jocelyn Frye at the National Partnership for Women and Families. Jocelyn, one in four Americans have a disability, or approximately 61 million people across this nation. We know that number is rapidly growing too. Often in policy work, we see disability siloed, separated away from discussions of racial and gender equity. Can you talk about why the National Partnership thinks it is important to bring a disability lens across your work and why you joined the Collaborative? Why is it important to apply an intersectional lens, including race, gender, and disability to economic policymaking?
JOCELYN FRYE: Well, thank you so much, Vilissa, for the question, and I too will start with a visual description. I’m a Black woman. I have dark brown/black hair with a little more gray than I care to admit. I’m wearing a red top, and I’m sitting in my living room or dining room, rather, with a backdrop of our bookcases, and wearing my favorite pearls. And it’s great to be on this dynamic panel.
I think where I would start is simply say we’re part of the Collaborative because we really couldn’t not be a part of the Collaborative. And say that we are working on policy to improve women’s lives, which has been the long mission of the National Partnership. One of the things that we are very clear about, and I think Secretary Castro and Representative Pressley were so powerful in saying, is that we have to do our work at the intersections. Women don’t live single issue lives, and they don’t have single identities. They have multiple identities. And part of the history of some work in the women’s community has been, in many ways, too narrow in pushing different communities to the side. It’s what I call sort of policymaking premised on different segments of the community in the shadows, and that we treat as afterthoughts.
If we’re really going to do the work of gender justice, if we’re really going to focus on economic justice, then we have to bring sort of a race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. So, we’re here because we have to be here to be committed to our work, and we do the work intersectionally because we have to do it if we’re going to be true to a mission that really is committed to lifting the experiences and the economic security of women and people of all genders. So, that’s part of the reason that we’re here.
I think the second thing is that we know that our economy works only when you include women in that conversation. And you have to center women, and I would say women of color in particular at the beginning, if you’re really trying to think through, how are we going to drive our economy, grow our economy, and make sure that it works for everybody and make sure that we have a nation that actually is making full use of all of its potential? And I think, as others have said at the outset, is too often, we forget about folks with disabilities. We bring them in at the end and sort of try to have makeshift solutions that we hope work for them.
And I think the thing that we know is that if you start with folks who experience multiple barriers, and you solve for their problems, then the solutions that you are coming up with are solutions that have broader reach, right? So, there’s a, it’s not just a theoretical strategy, there’s a method of making sure that you are putting folks who have multiple barriers, who are women of color with disabilities, at the heart of that conversation about what does it mean to grow our economy? That actually accomplishes the work of actually figuring out what are the policies and strategies that can help all of us? So, it’s essential, if we are committed to really trying to deal with economic justice, to be more inclusive and to bring that race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. [bright theme music returns]
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s show, Off-Kilter is powered by The Century Foundation and produced by We Act Radio, with a special shoutout to executive producer Troy Miller and his merry band of farm animals, and the indefatigable Abby Grimshaw. Transcripts, which help us make the show accessible, are courtesy of Cheryl Green and her fabulous feline coworker. Find us every week on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. And for the superfans, you can find a full archive of all past episodes and show transcripts over at TCF.org/Off-Kilter. Got an idea for a topic you’d like to hear us unpack or a guest you’ve been wanting to hear on the show? Send us a note at [email protected]. Or if social media is more your bag, give us a holler on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And if you like what we do here at Off-Kilter Enterprises, send us some love by hitting that subscribe button and rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts to help other folks find the pod. It really does help. Thanks again for listening and see you next week.
[bright theme music]
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by The Century Foundation. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week we’re taking a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programing to share a special virtual discussion hosted at The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of what’s called the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
We previewed the Collaborative launch a few weeks ago in a special behind-the-scenes episode with The Century Foundation’s new Disability Economic Justice team, and it brings together two dozen leading disability groups, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and finally break the link between disability and poverty that continues to persist in the U.S. more than three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. You can find the full event and all the materials discussed during it at DEJC.org. Let’s take a listen. [upbeat music break]
Welcome everyone. And on behalf of The Century Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and all of the Collaborative’s founding members, thank you all so much for joining us today for the official launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
My name is Rebecca Vallas. I’m a senior fellow here at The Century Foundation, where I’m proud to lead TCF’s Disability Economic Justice team, which officially launched in March of this year with the amazing Kim Knackstedt and Vilissa Thompson, whom you’ll get to hear from later during today’s event. It’s my distinct honor and privilege to serve as your emcee during today’s virtual event.
A few quick housekeeping notes before we get to the good stuff. We’d love for all of you to participate in today’s event by using the chat function. And our hope is, time permitting, to have a little time for questions at the end of the closing panel. You can also join us on Twitter by following @DEJCollab—that’s C O L L AB—and you can use the hashtag #DisabilityEconomicJustice to join the conversation as well. And finally, today’s event has an ASL interpreter pinned to the screen, as well as live captioning. If anyone experiences any problems with either of those, please send a message to the hosts in the chat so we can get that sorted out. And thank you to our interpreters and to our captioner for being with us today.
As a new report released today by The Century Foundation and the Center for Economic Policy Research finds, America’s disability community is facing a persistent economic crisis, an economic crisis that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 31 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, became law, people with disabilities in the United States still face poverty rates twice as high as non-disabled people and were paid just 74 cents for every dollar paid to non-disabled workers in 2020 due to pervasive discrimination and a litany of structural barriers that continue to stand in the way of economic security and upward mobility for disabled people in this country today.
Disabled people of color in the U.S. face even greater economic disparities and rates of poverty and hardship due to the compounding effects of structural as well as cultural ableism and racism. In just one example, the poverty rate among Black disabled adults was 28 percent in 2019, fully 10 percentage points higher than for white disabled adults.
Many of the persistent barriers to economic security facing Americans with disabilities are the result of policy failures that become visible when we center the perspectives and experiences of the disability community from inadequate affordable, accessible housing and transportation to a long history of disinvestment in community living supports and much, much more.
But despite the fact that 61 million, or more than one in four, U.S. adults live with disabilities in this country—numbers that are rapidly rising as the COVID-19 pandemic has already been the largest mass disabling event in modern history—to date, economic policy conversations in this country have rarely included a disability lens. People with disabilities have generally been an afterthought in our economic policymaking, much less at the table.
Now, new polling released today by The Century Foundation and another of our terrific partners in the Collaborative, Data for Progress, underscores how left behind the disability community feels after decades of being sidelined. Just one in three disabled voters—one in three—feel that leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities. Finally achieving disability economic justice in this country will require not only a redoubling of our national commitment to the unfulfilled goals of the ADA, but also a collective commitment to applying disability as a lens across the entire economic policy agenda, and an intentional acknowledgment that we will never achieve true economic justice in this nation if we fail to achieve economic justice for disabled people.
And that right there is the vision of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. A first of its kind initiative, it brings together two dozen leading disability organizations, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and drive a disability economic justice agenda.
In 2022, nearly 32 years after the ADA was signed into law, disability and poverty should not go hand in hand, and we can no longer afford to acknowledge the “unfinished business”—I put that in scare quotes—of the ADA once a year on its anniversary in July. Achieving long denied economic justice for disabled people in the U.S. will require centering the perspectives and expertise of disabled people across all of the nation’s economic policymaking. And I’m incredibly excited and humbled to work alongside the diverse array of remarkable policy leaders who make up the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative to finally make that a reality. You can find a full list of the founding members at DEJC.org.
Finally, a huge thanks to the Ford Foundation for being such an incredible partner and to everyone at The Century Foundation, especially our president Mark Zuckerman, whom we’ll be hearing from shortly, for TCF’s phenomenal commitment to this work.
And with that, I have the great pleasure of introducing our panel of distinguished guests, our first panel for today’s event, and welcoming them to the virtual stage, along with one of my very favorite co-conspirators and my co-moderator for our opening session, Rebecca Cokley of the Ford Foundation, whom I had the honor of founding the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress years ago, when we were the law firm of Vallas and Cokley, as many folks may remember. She now serves as the first ever program officer for U.S. disability rights at the Ford Foundation. Hi, Cokley. Come on stage.
We are also honored to have two incredible leaders who have, in many ways, paved the way for the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s very existence with us today as well, and I’m gonna welcome them to the virtual stage too. Julián Castro is the former Secretary of Housing & Urban Development under President Barack Obama. He now serves as the Klinsky Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress at Harvard Law School. Secretary Castro, thank you so much for being with us today.
SECRETARY JULIÁN CASTRO: Wonderful to be with you. Thanks for the invitation.
VALLAS: And Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who represents the 7th District of Massachusetts and really needs no introduction to the disability community because she’s become such an incredible leader, champion, and friend to the community. Congresswoman, thank you so much for being with us today as well.
REPRESENTATIVE AYANNA PRESSLEY: Great to be with you both. Well, with everyone! [laughs]
VALLAS: Well, and Cokley, it’s wonderful to get to share the virtual stage with you. We don’t spend nearly enough time together these days. I miss you. I miss being down the hall from you. But I’m gonna give you moderator’s privilege to ask the first question of our distinguished panel.
REBECCA COKLEY: Thank you so much, Vallas. So, distinguished panel members and friends, the disability community calls those that grew up at the nexus of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act the ADA generation: people who grew up with different expectations for disabled people around what access to school looks like, access to work, to health care, to society. We are now more than 30 years past the ADA, and we have a whole new generation of people with disabilities that have been created as a result of this pandemic and a whole generation of people with disabilities that have been impacted by the pandemic. But yet, every year, when we mark the anniversary of the ADA, folks are still being told, “Well, we still have this much further to go. There are still unmet goals.” We’re facing an economic crisis for disabled Americans, and we were still well before this pandemic. So, how do we ensure that we don’t go another 30 years only talking about the fight for disabled Americans and their families in July as the continued unfinished business?
VALLAS: And I think that’s a great question for both of you. Yeah.
COKLEY: Representative Pressley, do you wanna start? [laughs]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. Again, just wonderful to be with all of you. This is a long time coming and a historic moment. One moment while I digress and just say that I am a Black woman with a bald head, wearing a black blouse and pink lipstick and pearl hoop earrings. Okay.
Cokley, you’re exactly right. The disability community in America has faced systemic disenfranchisement in the form of policy violence really for generations, from unconscionable barriers to health care to income limits for those seeking accessible housing to barriers to marry whom you love. And my mother, may she rest in peace and power, told me often that to be born Black in America was to be born into struggle. And I extend that sentiment to those in the disability community as well. Daily, you are navigating and organizing for your humanity, even if you’re not an activist per se. And while there is certainly beauty in the struggle, when I think about a generation, when I think about the world we’re trying to create for our children, I dream of a life where they are defined by their joy and their freedom, and they are navigating a markedly more accessible world in every single sense.
And the COVID pandemic, you know, I forget who said it, Cokley, but there is that expression that, “We are not makers of history; we are shaped by it.” And so, we are, in this moment, the pandemic is shaping us, and it has really laid bare these pre-existing deep inequities and disparities, exacerbated them, and our community has experienced so many deep and painful losses. And policy, it’s my love language, and I fundamentally believe that in this moment, we must act with responsive policy as this pandemic is shaping us. And it has to be crafted in close proximity with those closest to the pain. The disability community, marginalized communities have been victimized and bore the burden of policy violence. We have been precise in that depression and oppression. I think we can legislate justice and healing in the same way that we have legislated marginalization. And again, for generations, policy has been used in that very exact way to advance discrimination.
And so, in this moment, we have to be just as precise in advancing policy that heals and advances, and we can’t shy away from governing moments. One way that we as folks, I think, in public life and in public office and as legislators, need to move to advance the promise of true disability justice is we have to push back against these unjust, false, binary choices. So often our community is asked to moderate our aspirations and ask for less or where we’re pitted against other marginalized communities. And what we need, I just reject the premise of these unjust binary choices. It’s money for Home and Community-Based Services and critical SSI reform. It’s housing justice that centers the disability community and free public transit that is accessible. It’s a federal jobs guarantee and addressing our broken criminal legal system. Our destinies are tied.
VALLAS: And Secretary Castro, same question to you. I think I will let you get in there as well.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. Well, first of all, let me say again to Rebecca, and Rebecca Cokley and Vallas, thank you so much for the invitation to be a part of this. To The Century Foundation and the Ford Foundation, congratulations on launching this collaborative. And it’s always a pleasure to be with Representative Pressley, who has been so inspiring to me and I know to so many others across our country. Thank you for participating.
I think that Representative Pressley said it very well that it’s past due that issues that touch upon the disability community receive greater attention, greater policy resources, a different way of looking at them, and also that we forge partnerships and allyships. And that’s why I’m so excited about this. I think your question was, how do we ensure that the next 32 years aren’t spent talking about unfinished business? One of the best ways that we can do that is to make sure that we forge these partnerships, forge these coalitions to get stronger and stronger in the political realm at every level: the federal level, of course, but also the state level and the local level.
I think about, just as one example, this moment that we’re in where Representative Pressley, Congress, and the President put forward a groundbreaking investment in infrastructure, and all of the decisions that are gonna be made in the coming months, years, and decades about how that money is spent and when that money is spent, whose lives it touches and impacts and boosts quality of life for and the role that policymakers, whether they come from the disability community or not, have in shaping inclusive investment in resources. I also think that this is something that is not only for the public sector to tackle, but also the private sector. And of course, y’all are setting a great example in the non-profit sector.
And sometimes I feel like in the progress that we need to make—and Representative Pressley, I think, touched on this as well—sometimes I feel like the biggest stumbling blocks are not only policy and politicians, but really, the culture that we live in. A culture that says that mental health issues are not the same as physical health issues. A culture that devalues the experience of people living with disabilities. A culture that too oftentimes is perfectly fine stigmatizing people with disabilities, laughing about people with disabilities in different ways. And that all of us as individuals, as human beings, and also in our roles, from people in Hollywood to people in the corridors, of course, of Congress, and on corporate boards have a responsibility to change that culture so that as that culture changes, we can make even bigger changes in policy and investment in resources. That’s what I look forward to, at least hope for, in the coming years.
VALLAS: Well, and Secretary Castro, I wanna stay with you for a moment because in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, for the first time in American political history, nearly, excuse me, every single Democratic candidate for president, every single one, released a disability plan during the primary campaign. And that was a particularly significant moment in American political history for the community. This was not something we had ever seen happen. And your proposal, your campaign plan was really one of the anchors of that primary season, really making important progress towards helping people understand that every issue was a disability issue. How do we move from campaign promises to finally achieving disability economic justice so that this economy finally works for disabled people?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. I was so happy to see the level of focus among the various Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 on justice for people with disabilities. And I think that that…hopefully, the work of all of those candidates serves as a blueprint for not only candidates, but most importantly, elected officials going forward. I know that it’s a part of the party platform, some of that is part of the party platforms, especially the Democratic Party, which is encouraging. To move on to the next level, the next phase of that, I think that it’s gonna take the whole gamut of how things change in a democracy. It’s gonna take the kind of partnerships that y’all are forging today and going forward. It’s gonna take all of the on-the-ground activism that is out there in local communities, in state legislatures, and in Washington, D.C.
And I think in this moment—and Representative Pressley referenced this as well—we’re in this very different moment for America still, as we work our way, hopefully toward the end of this pandemic, where I feel like everybody should have this sense that we’re all in this together. In their head must be implanted more of a sense of that at least than we were feeling three years ago, before this pandemic. And in that, you have an opportunity to move people’s hearts and minds to support changes to policy that affect the most vulnerable, that boost their quality of life and their economic mobility more than we have in decades. And so, I would just say that it’s gonna take all of that on-the-ground activism at every level.
It’s also not just on the disability community. This is really on all of us—and I speak about elected officials here—to go above and beyond your comfort zone oftentimes, to understand, to learn about, to challenge the notions even that you have sometimes, to educate yourself, and then to delve into the policy of it. And so, I think all of that, if we do those things, then we can see that those policy prescriptions actually become reality.
The last thing I’ll say is, of course, we’re dealing in a political environment, right, that is gonna dictate our ability to get a lot of these things done in the future. And I wish that I could say that we have two parties that are equally concerned about the concerns of the disability community. We have to work on both parties because the fact is that—everybody knows here this better than I do, that—people with disabilities come from every community and every ideology, every walk of life, in every state, red and blue. And that provides a hope that we can make progress even in the midst of a very polarized political situation in Washington. And I’m even more confident because of champions like Representative Pressley that I know are always there pressing the case, trying to make progress, trying to convince their colleagues on both sides of the aisle. That’s what we need.
VALLAS: And I should note that there is immense bipartisanship among voters when it comes to disability economic justice priorities. And that new polling I referenced before from The Century Foundation and Data for Progress just out today doesn’t just find that people with disabilities are feeling left behind, it also finds that there is immense widespread bipartisan support for all kinds of disability economic justice priorities. We just haven’t, as you’re noting, seen quite that level of support within the halls of power. So, just note to policymakers that the support is there among your voters on both sides. Cokley, do you wanna take the next question to Congresswoman Pressley?
COKLEY: Definitely. Congresswoman, I go back to actually, I can actually remember the day it was when our teams met up, when I was still at the Center for American Progress. And it was the day that your video dropped on The Root. And I remember sitting in the lobby of your office and watching the staff completely all abuzz with the responses coming in to the video where you discussed living with alopecia, and it was so ironic that we were sitting in that lobby waiting to meet with your team that day. And watching the response, watching the community welcome you with open arms was quite honestly one of the coolest moments and one of the moments that I was proudest of for my community. I mean, we had plotted all along. We’re like, statistically, someone in The Squad has to be a person with a disability. And I will say all along I was like, “I really hope it’s AP. I hope she’s ours.”
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: [laughs]
COKLEY: You know, we have our drafts. That’s how it works. And it was revolutionary the way that you self-identified as part of the community and the way that you have taken on meeting and engaging with the community in a really new way. You often talk about how policy is your love language, and I think one of the things that’s been really cool about the way that you and your team work is that you don’t see disability as like a short bus issue. It’s not just like, “This is the disability policy, and this is everything else.” The team is constantly thinking—I know your head is constantly thinking—about what are the disability issues around low-income housing? What are the disability issues in carceral reform? Can you talk a little bit about how you have built that mindset into how you craft policy?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. First, I do just wanna take a moment to offer some verbal flowers and effusive praise for Secretary Castro. Never take his leadership for granted. This is someone who moves with authenticity and intention in all things that he does. And so, we thank him for his leadership and being a pacesetter in this space. And it’s wonderful to be at this virtual table with him and to partner with him on so many issues.
I do wanna back up a little bit in terms of sort of how I come to this work and what has made me move with intention when it comes to bringing a disability lens to every issue. Prior to my election to Congress, where I’ve had the honor of serving for a little over three years now, I served on the Boston City Council. And although transportation is not a municipal issue per se—in terms of funding, it’s a state issue—it was an issue that I was leaning in on because transit justice is really at the intersect of every other issue. And I went to a member of the disability community, a disability justice advocate, and I asked to ride public transit with her. And a ride that should have taken 30 minutes took almost two hours, and it was because the elevators were broken and a host of other infrastructure failures, policy failures, budgetary, moral failures. And at the end of that commute, I cried openly. And I’m getting emotional thinking about it now because I felt such shame that members of my community that I had not seen were being relegated to second class citizenship and that these were civil rights violations happening in plain view. And that I had not been as intentional and inclusive in my movement building and my policy advocacy.
And so, that shifted a lot of things for me around making sure that I’m proximate so that I better understand the intersectionalities, the complexities, the nuances, the various identities. As a voter, I hate when an elected official single-issues me. And you know, we have to ask more of ourselves and of those who represent us. You can’t just come to Black America and talk about mass incarceration or come to the disability community and only talk about the ADA or come to the LGBTQA community and at the time, maybe you have spoken about marriage equality or trans rights, or the Latino community and just talk about immigration, or women and only talk about bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. We live in intersectionality, and I think for too long, the disability community and disability policy has really been treated as an add-on or an afterthought.
Again, when the reality is, if we take an intersectional approach to policymaking, disability and other aspects of identity and the way people show up in the world is really central, you know. The policy should be responsive to the needs of the people, and people have multiple identities. And so, we have to start with those who are marginalized, start with those who’ve been made vulnerable, start with those who’ve been sidelined, systematically left out of the conversation.
And then I’ll close here, Cokley, to your point about our carceral system. The other thing that matters is storytelling and narrative and discourse because that shapes policy. So, I can’t talk about intervening to ensure that a 15-year-old child in Michigan who would’ve been incarcerated during the pandemic for not participating in remote learning, I’m not going to erase out of her narrative that she is a member of the disability community, and that was a core part of her story and her lived experience. When we see the latest iteration of a iteration of police violence and brutality with a Black man, and we don’t, I tell the story that he is disabled, when we erase that from the storytelling, from the narrative, from the discourse, then that also doesn’t show up in our policymaking and in our advocacy. And so, we have to make plain how systems are intersect, fit, and overlap and marginalized and how policy is not a dusty book on a shelf. It’s not static. Policy is the difference, quite literally, between who lives and who dies and who thrives. So, I think it begins with being in proximity, bringing that lens to everything, and then in the storytelling and the narrative, which shapes the discourse, just understanding that we have to be inclusive in that and not erase out disability identity for many of these other marginalized experiences and injustices.
VALLAS: Congresswoman, I get chills every time you get talking about these issues. And we’ve got just a few minutes left, but I wanna stay with you. And then Secretary Castro, you’re gonna bring us home, so get ready. Congresswoman Pressley, so far, we’ve been discussing the unfinished business of the ADA, the importance of bringing a disability lens across all of our policymaking, especially our economic policymaking. But right now, this moment when we’re having this virtual discussion, this isn’t just any other year where we’re talking about the unfinished business of the ADA, right?
We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, much as many people are not acting that way. And we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has already yielded the largest mass disabling event in many of our lifetimes. And that’s due to, of course, long COVID. Congresswoman Pressley, you have been such a leader on this issue. You’ve been speaking out on behalf of folks with long COVID and elevating their voices. And people with disabilities across this country, including many folks with long COVID, are really feeling left behind, as we saw in that polling, but as we know through so many other means as well. How can leaders respond in this moment, this mass disabling prompt event, to finally listen to and hear and engage with disabled people instead of, as you’ve noted, allowing folks to be ignored and erased and shut out as they historically have been?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah. Well, I ran for office because I wanted to champion the needs of those that are historically ignored, left out, and left behind. And as I moved in and out of community and paid attention to organizing that was happening online, it was clear to me that the long hauler community was being left behind, and I wanted to make sure that it was not being ignored when it comes to our public health response. And the disability community, many advocates, including who’s with us today, said at the outset of the pandemic that this had the potential to be a mass disabling event. And so, it is certainly devastating to see that coming to pass. And it makes the case for everything from Home and Community-Based Services to paid leave. I can argue Medicare for All. I certainly think it makes the case for that. And I want those that’ve been struggling with long COVID, who have been told that their symptoms and experiences are imaginary, that what they have experienced is real, it is as real as they are. It is deserving and warrants a federal response. We have conservative estimates that the long hauler community could be as many as eight million people, and those are conservative estimates because we don’t have the data, which is something that I continue to push for.
But I’ve introduced legislation to meet the needs of long haulers, to have a federal response, to expand long COVID clinics through our health care providers who are providing those who have met the needs of the most marginalized, like our community health centers, to provide them with grants to ensure that anyone who’s struggling with these debilitating symptoms, which is grossly affecting one’s physical health and quality of life and our workforce, that they’re able to access the health care that they need in community. And so, I’m just gonna keep banging the drum on that. And again, I thank our leaders on the Disability Justice Committee for being the canaries in the coal mine early on, on that.
So, but I think at the end of the day, it’s time, as we move forward, that we can get away from these cruel and dated policies like the marriage penalty and imagine what would happen if we fully funded the IDEA. Even the best intended elected officials need to be held accountable. And in my view, daily, we need to organize to press for our full humanity to be recognized, for our rights to be codified in law, and moreover, implemented and funded. So, I’m not fighting for scraps. I’m fighting for liberation. And that is what is beautiful about this space that you have all came together. And I’m just honored to be a part of this collaborative.
VALLAS: I might have to steal that as the tagline for the Collaborative: “We’re not fighting for scraps. We’re fighting for liberation.” Thank you, Congresswoman Pressley for that.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let’s go! I’ll buy the first T-shirt! [laughs] Let’s go! Let’s go!
COKLEY: I was gonna say it’s time for some swag.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah! [laughs]
COKLEY: We need some swag with that on there.
Mr. Secretary, to take us home, I wanna pose that question to you. I think one of the things when I think about your campaign that was so historic was quite literally the day the plan dropped. A, you did something that only one other candidate did. You picked up the phone, and you called the people that worked on the plan. And you thanked them. And I remember I got a phone call from (210), and I didn’t answer it because my ex-best friend is from San Antonio. And I was like, “Why is this chick calling me?!” And then your team texted and were like, “Cokley, answer the phone. It’s the Secretary.” And I answered it, and you said, “Thank you.” And it blew me away. And then it was, “Now we wanna do a Twitter chat. Can we pull something together in 24 hours?” And it was like, “Give us 48! We can do it in 48.”
And I think one of the things that you and your team were so great about was getting to the community where they were, reaching out to the community and saying, hey, we’re not doing rallies. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Let me go to where disabled people are. Let me hop on Twitter. Let’s do something. Let’s pull in the Crip The Vote folks. Let’s actually have this really phenomenal conversation with Sandy Ho, you know? And that’s not typical, unfortunately. We recently found that only one in three disabled voters feel that their leaders in Washington care about the community. How can leaders respond in this moment, this historic mass disabling event, to finally listen to, respond, and engage with disabled people instead of sort of perpetuating the ongoing erasure that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about today?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Well, thanks for your kind words, Rebecca. I think that it starts with approaching public service as a public servant, as one who is there to serve others, to listen to others, to learn from others. I feel like, and don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of folks that do, including, of course, Representative Pressley do that. But I think that too oftentimes as politicians, we get caught up in another mode, which is a mode of dictating or assuming that we know what’s best. Or sometimes to give folks the benefit of the doubt, they’re so busy tackling different issues that they don’t pause enough to listen and to understand that the lived experiences of the people who, even if they have a heart to serve them, are so important to try and get to understand and to let that lead.
And that’s what we were trying to do in the campaign with how we approached our policy. It’s also, I think, the approach that some of the other candidates took and many elected officials do take right now. We need more of that. We need more people in policymaking and in the private sector who are in a position to make a difference to approach things in that way. I think that we also need to, again, seize this moment that we’re in, where we have more people in our country who are willing to look out for their neighbor to try and be inclusive, people just at an everyday level because of what we’ve just been through and seize that opportunity to forge partnerships, forge coalitions, push that on-the-ground activism, and make change happen.
One of my most unforgettable moments from when I was HUD Secretary was sitting in the audience in March of 2015 in Selma, Alabama as President Obama and the late Congressman John Lewis and others marked the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. And one of the things that President Obama said then about the civil rights movement that I think applies here is that there’s no denying that a lot of progress has been made. You know, 2015 was not 1965. But there’s also no denying that so much more has to be made. And so, to that unfinished business that we undoubtedly have, we need the hearts and minds and the hard work of people through all walks of life. And we need a reawakening of the needs of the disability community to thunder through the actions of people in power. That’s what I hope for.
VALLAS: I can’t think of better words to end this panel on. Secretary Castro, Congresswoman Pressley, thank you so, so, so much for being with us this morning to kick off this Collaborative, for your leadership, for your partnership, for being such friends of the community, and for being so wonderful to work with and having such fabulous staff. We have to give a shoutout to your incredible staff as well who are always there for us.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yes, Sarah Groh!
SECRETARY CASTRO: [chuckles]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let me just tell you, I’m just so very fortunate. But thank you all, and this was so special. And what an epic day, again, long time coming and looking forward to continuing to do the work of this unfinished business with you, Mr. Secretary.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Thank you.
VALLAS: Well, we look forward to working with both of you. So, we’re gonna send you off on your way and let you off the virtual stage. Rebecca Cokley, thank you so much for co-moderating this panel with me, for being in this work with us, and thank you to Ford as well. So, I think that’s all the time we’ve got for this panel right now.
But now it is my great pleasure to introduce my boss, Mark Zuckerman, president of The Century Foundation, who is gonna join us to share a little bit more about TCF’s incredible commitment to this work. Thank you so much, Mark, for being with us today, and take it away. The stage is yours.
MARK ZUCKERMAN: Thank you so much, Rebecca and Kim and Vilissa. I wanna say flat out that you three are the policy dream team doing Century and the community proud. So, thank you for everything that you’re doing. Now, welcome everyone. I’m so glad you could join us today. That was just an amazing conversation.
Today we build and honor really the work of a generation of advocates who came before us. For me, I worked for Congressman George Miller for many years and the remarkable Judy Heumann who grew up in a world where children with disabilities weren’t even permitted to attend public schools. They said that was wrong, and they made it right. So, yes, we’ve come a long way down the road, but we have miles and miles to go. That is the unfinished work of this effort that we’re launching today.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Century Foundation, we’re a progressive, independent think tank that drives policy change to improve people’s lives. We pursue economic, racial, gender, and now disability equity and justice for all people in the country, in education and in health care and in work. Our economic team at TCF has been doing remarkable work to build an economy that works for everyone. But we knew we were missing a critical piece of the economic justice work: the perspectives and experiences of 61 million people in this country with disabilities. We must ensure that the economy works for them, too. Right now, we are failing, and the economy is failing disabled people.
That’s why we are proud to announce the launch today of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, an effort that’s spearheaded by TCF’s very own Disability Economic Justice team. This work is so critical because it centers the unique perspectives and experiences of the disability community, enabling us here at Century and our collaborative partners to bring a disability-focused lens to all our work. Because, as you’ve heard from our opening panelists, every issue, every issue is a disability issue.
And of course, without our incredible partner, the Ford Foundation, this much needed work would not be possible. Our friends and colleagues at the Ford Foundation are leaders ensuring that disability rights are front and center in the philanthropy and non-profit world. The Ford Foundation is the first major philanthropy in the country to launch its own disability rights portfolio, and the wonderful Rebecca Cokley, who you’ve just heard from, is the first program officer to take the lead on this critical work.
I now have the pleasure to introduce Sarita Gupta, the vice president for U.S. Programs at the Ford Foundation, who can tell you more about Ford’s important work on disability rights and justice, and why the launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative couldn’t be coming at a more important time. Thank you so much for your leadership on this issue. And now I turn it over to you, Sarita.
SARITA GUPTA: Am I muted? Okay. Can you all hear me now? Perfect. Thank you, Mark and to the entire dream team at The Century Foundation for inviting Ford to join this exciting event today. I’m really thrilled to be here with you all. As a longtime workers’ rights and economic justice advocate, I have the privilege of working with some of you and others in the disability community to address a range of issues, including access to good quality jobs and fair wages and working conditions, and access to affordable long-term supports and services, and basically, the right to live and work with dignity, respect, and agency.
And even as I reflect on my years of work in the economic justice arena, it never felt like it was enough. We could always do so much more to really weave together and integrate the needs of the disability community and opportunities with the disability community in broader economic justice work, which is why this is so exciting; today is so exciting. It is long overdue for us to have such a collaborative where we can truly evolve and grow the work, support and deepen partnerships, and shift culture—as both Congresswoman Pressley and Secretary Castro named—and to meet the broad range of issues impacting the disability community. At the Ford Foundation, the U.S. disability rights work led by Rebecca Cokley is now part of our holistic U.S. programs portfolio, which is exciting and really a demonstration and expression of our growth and commitment to this work.
At the Ford Foundation, we believe in the inherent dignity of all people. Yet around the world, billions of people are excluded from full participation in the political, economic, and cultural systems that shape their lives. And we have learned over the last few years, in particular with leaders like Rebecca and others, the degree to which that exclusion has been experienced by people in the disability community. For us, we understand that disability and poverty are causes and consequences of each other, which is why the Ford Foundation, after much consultation from the disability community, is grounding our U.S. Disability Rights Program strategy in economic justice. There is no strategy that will be successful in eliminating poverty that fails to center disability. And so, to see the disability groups here at the table with our partners working to eradicate poverty is so exciting. This is a core goal of the work we’re trying to drive at Ford, and collaboratives like this can really serve as an example for how to truly weave a disability rights and justice-centric lens across any policy area.
Moving ahead, we need to continue to drive the message that people with disabilities are not just recipients of programs and services, but they’re also students, workers, contributors to the workforce and society. The need for support does not eliminate one’s power, one’s agency, one’s right to access the promises of the ADA for full participation, independent living, economic self-sufficiency, and equality of opportunity. I’m just thrilled and excited to be a part of this effort with all of you. Mark, I’m gonna turn it back over to you or to Rebecca. Thank you.
VALLAS: Thank you so much, Sarita. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are so lucky to have such an incredible partner in the Ford Foundation, and we are so grateful to everyone over there, you and to Rebecca Cokley and Darren Walker and everyone for your incredible partnership and support of this work. This truly, as Mark said, would not be happening if not for your partnership and support.
So, now I am thrilled to kick it over to our closing panel. And to do that, it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce my amazing colleagues on the Disability Economic Justice Team here at The Century Foundation. So, I’m gonna welcome them onto the virtual stage. They’re gonna be our co-moderators for this closing panel. Kim Knackstedt is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. She comes to us from the White House, where most recently, she served as the first-ever director of disability policy on the White House Domestic Policy Council, an exciting development in and of itself that that position was even created in the Biden administration. So, welcome Kim. And the amazing Vilissa Thompson, who also probably needs no introduction to this community. So thrilled to have Vilissa as a fellow here at The Century Foundation. Vilissa is the founder of Ramp Your Voice, among many other things, a licensed social worker, and really one of the preeminent thought leaders within the disability community at the intersection of race and gender.
Kim, Vilissa, I am so thrilled to bring you up to this stage to moderate our final panel, which features just a few of our phenomenal members of this collaborative: Micaela Connery, co-founder of The Kelsey; Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families; Mia Ives-Rublee, director of the Center for American Progress’s Disability Justice Initiative; Lisa McCorkell of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative; Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and last but certainly not least, Nancy Smith of Activating Change, which is a project at the Vera Institute of Justice. Kim, Vilissa, without further ado, I’m gonna hand it over to you, ladies, to bring us home.
VILISSA THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Rebecca, and thank you, everybody, for being here. This has been such an incredible event. As Rebecca said, my name’s Vilissa Thompson. I’m a fellow here at TCF, and I wanna give a visual description of myself before I pass it along to Kim. I am a light-skinned Black woman who is sitting in her wheelchair. I am wearing rectangle-shaped glasses. I have on a new color lip gloss. I’ve got on a long sleeve shirt, wearing silver hoop earrings, and my background is a sunny yellow.
KIM KNACKSTEDT: Okay. Thanks, Vilissa! This is Kim Knackstedt, and I’ll also give a visual description. I’m a blond woman with shoulder length hair. I’m wearing a white blazer with a black dress under it, and here in my office at TCF. I’m really, really excited to be here with you. I’ll send it back over to you, Vilissa, to kick us off.
THOMPSON: All right. So, in the interest of time, we wanted to hear from all of our amazing panelists. So, we’re just gonna to jump right in. If you have any questions, feel free to share them in the chat.
KNACKSTEDT: Perfect. So, our first question will go for you, Micaela. And again, Micaela’s with The Kelsey, and so feel free to tell us a little bit about that when you provide your answers. So, here’s our question, Micaela. Right now, just five percent of our federally funded affordable housing is required to be accessible. Accessible, affordable housing is critical to access to community and move out of segregated institutional settings. We delve into the barriers this presents to disabled Americans in the report released today, and a link to that report is in the chat. From your perspective, Micaela, in what ways must our national housing infrastructure change in order to increase economic opportunity and justice for people with disabilities?
MICAELA CONNERY: Thanks so much, Kim and Vilissa. I am Micaela Connery. I am a white woman with a brown ponytail, and my virtual background is a housing construction site in front of San Francisco’s City Hall with the logo The Kelsey. And The Kelsey is a San Francisco-based, not-for-profit advancing disability-forward housing solutions and also working to change the systems and policies so that those solutions can be possible at scale. And so, we are thrilled to be joining this Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, recognizing that access to housing is such an essential part of economic opportunity for all people, and especially for people with disabilities.
And Kim, to your question, for so many years, I think we’ve thought about two things as it comes to housing. We’ve thought about bare minimum code requirements, which we know is not even close to scratching the surface of the need. And we’ve really thought about housing that has been a slow iteration on the institutions that we worked so hard to close for so many years. And when the promise of Olmstead and Title II of the ADA came to fruition, we actually haven’t created the policy systems and funding mechanisms to realize that promise, to make that promise from right to reality.
And so, for us, we look at the fact that people with disabilities are more likely to face housing discrimination. They’re more likely to experience housing insecurity and cannot afford rent on SSI in a single U.S. market. Not a single city in the U.S. can you afford basic housing on SSI. These individuals are more likely to experience homelessness and more likely to experience housing insecurity as a result. And we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that a lack of access to affordable, accessible, inclusive housing had deathly consequences for people with disabilities who were forced to stay in congregate settings where they were more likely to contract COVID, or they were housing insecure or living in inadequate housing or cramped communities where they couldn’t even self-isolate or get the supports or services they needed while being forced to stay at home where they lived.
And so, this is, you know, Secretary Castro spoke: We have a real opportunity as we think about rebuilding our housing infrastructure in this moment in time to make sure building that housing infrastructure is inclusive of disabled individuals. And that actually, in doing so, we create better housing experiences for all people. We create housing that has deeper affordability, with better access to vouchers and better subsidies for extremely low-income and mixed-income housing. We create better access to Home and Community-Based Services that are housing-related services to make sure that people can find and retain and receive the services that they want in housing. Community-based housing isn’t limited to—I so appreciate the false binary—community-based housing isn’t something that’s only available to some people with disabilities. It is something, no matter what an individual’s support need is, they should be able to have the services and the housing access to live in the community of their choice.
And then those solutions look like things like increased leadership at HUD focused on housing for people with disabilities and increased leadership of disabled people within our state, federal, and local housing agencies and within our housing development and policy community. It includes policies like subsidies, vouchers, and access to incentives that support people to go beyond the minimum abhorrent code requirements that we need to make code. But that is a minimum. That is a floor. That is not what our goal should be. And we need incentives and funding mechanisms in our federal and state programs to support meeting that.
And we need to rethink what truly inclusive disability-forward housing looks like. We need to stop saying we’re gonna tweak the institution and just sort of make mini-institutions or build the same models that we’ve tried to end for years and go to proximal to individuals with disabilities and ask them, “What does housing look like? And how, if we created something from scratch, could we create those communities that meet that need?” So, we’re excited to do this work in partnership with this collaborative and our allies in this field.
KNACKSTEDT: Amazing. And I love how you said that it’s the floor, not the actual goal. I think that’s such a great way to put it, where so often that we think of it as that’s the goal versus the flipped way around. And we need to still raise that standard, even as is. So, really, really loved your answer there. Vilissa, I’ll turn it over to you for the next question.
THOMPSON: Great. So, our next panelist would be Jocelyn Frye at the National Partnership for Women and Families. Jocelyn, one in four Americans have a disability, or approximately 61 million people across this nation. We know that number is rapidly growing too. Often in policy work, we see disability siloed, separated away from discussions of racial and gender equity. Can you talk about why the National Partnership thinks it is important to bring a disability lens across your work and why you joined the Collaborative? Why is it important to apply an intersectional lens, including race, gender, and disability to economic policymaking?
JOCELYN FRYE: Well, thank you so much, Vilissa, for the question, and I too will start with a visual description. I’m a Black woman. I have dark brown/black hair with a little more gray than I care to admit. I’m wearing a red top, and I’m sitting in my living room or dining room, rather, with a backdrop of our bookcases, and wearing my favorite pearls. And it’s great to be on this dynamic panel.
I think where I would start is simply say we’re part of the Collaborative because we really couldn’t not be a part of the Collaborative. And say that we are working on policy to improve women’s lives, which has been the long mission of the National Partnership. One of the things that we are very clear about, and I think Secretary Castro and Representative Pressley were so powerful in saying, is that we have to do our work at the intersections. Women don’t live single issue lives, and they don’t have single identities. They have multiple identities. And part of the history of some work in the women’s community has been, in many ways, too narrow in pushing different communities to the side. It’s what I call sort of policymaking premised on different segments of the community in the shadows, and that we treat as afterthoughts.
If we’re really going to do the work of gender justice, if we’re really going to focus on economic justice, then we have to bring sort of a race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. So, we’re here because we have to be here to be committed to our work, and we do the work intersectionally because we have to do it if we’re going to be true to a mission that really is committed to lifting the experiences and the economic security of women and people of all genders. So, that’s part of the reason that we’re here.
I think the second thing is that we know that our economy works only when you include women in that conversation. And you have to center women, and I would say women of color in particular at the beginning, if you’re really trying to think through, how are we going to drive our economy, grow our economy, and make sure that it works for everybody and make sure that we have a nation that actually is making full use of all of its potential? And I think, as others have said at the outset, is too often, we forget about folks with disabilities. We bring them in at the end and sort of try to have makeshift solutions that we hope work for them.
And I think the thing that we know is that if you start with folks who experience multiple barriers, and you solve for their problems, then the solutions that you are coming up with are solutions that have broader reach, right? So, there’s a, it’s not just a theoretical strategy, there’s a method of making sure that you are putting folks who have multiple barriers, who are women of color with disabilities, at the heart of that conversation about what does it mean to grow our economy? That actually accomplishes the work of actually figuring out what are the policies and strategies that can help all of us? So, it’s essential, if we are committed to really trying to deal with economic justice, to be more inclusive and to bring that race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. [bright theme music returns]
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s show, Off-Kilter is powered by The Century Foundation and produced by We Act Radio, with a special shoutout to executive producer Troy Miller and his merry band of farm animals, and the indefatigable Abby Grimshaw. Transcripts, which help us make the show accessible, are courtesy of Cheryl Green and her fabulous feline coworker. Find us every week on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. And for the superfans, you can find a full archive of all past episodes and show transcripts over at TCF.org/Off-Kilter. Got an idea for a topic you’d like to hear us unpack or a guest you’ve been wanting to hear on the show? Send us a note at [email protected]. Or if social media is more your bag, give us a holler on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And if you like what we do here at Off-Kilter Enterprises, send us some love by hitting that subscribe button and rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts to help other folks find the pod. It really does help. Thanks again for listening and see you next week.
Tags: disability, Off Kilter
Off-Kilter Podcast: Announcing the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative
This week, we’re taking a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programming to share a special virtual discussion hosted by The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of the new Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. Off-Kilter previewed the collaborative’s launch a few weeks ago in a special behind-the-scenes episode with TCF’s new Disability Economic Justice team: it brings together two dozen leading disability groups, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and finally break the link between disability and poverty that continues to persist in the United States more than three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law.
For more:
Here’s the press release announcing the collaborative: you can find the full event and all the materials discussed during it at DEJC.org.
[bright theme music]
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by The Century Foundation. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week we’re taking a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programing to share a special virtual discussion hosted at The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of what’s called the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
We previewed the Collaborative launch a few weeks ago in a special behind-the-scenes episode with The Century Foundation’s new Disability Economic Justice team, and it brings together two dozen leading disability groups, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and finally break the link between disability and poverty that continues to persist in the U.S. more than three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. You can find the full event and all the materials discussed during it at DEJCo.org. Let’s take a listen. [upbeat music break]
Welcome everyone. And on behalf of The Century Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and all of the Collaborative’s founding members, thank you all so much for joining us today for the official launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
My name is Rebecca Vallas. I’m a senior fellow here at The Century Foundation, where I’m proud to lead TCF’s Disability Economic Justice team, which officially launched in March of this year with the amazing Kim Knackstedt and Vilissa Thompson, whom you’ll get to hear from later during today’s event. It’s my distinct honor and privilege to serve as your emcee during today’s virtual event.
A few quick housekeeping notes before we get to the good stuff. We’d love for all of you to participate in today’s event by using the chat function. And our hope is, time permitting, to have a little time for questions at the end of the closing panel. You can also join us on Twitter by following @DEJCollab—that’s C O L L AB—and you can use the hashtag #DisabilityEconomicJustice to join the conversation as well. And finally, today’s event has an ASL interpreter pinned to the screen, as well as live captioning. If anyone experiences any problems with either of those, please send a message to the hosts in the chat so we can get that sorted out. And thank you to our interpreters and to our captioner for being with us today.
As a new report released today by The Century Foundation and the Center for Economic Policy Research finds, America’s disability community is facing a persistent economic crisis, an economic crisis that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 31 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, became law, people with disabilities in the United States still face poverty rates twice as high as non-disabled people and were paid just 74 cents for every dollar paid to non-disabled workers in 2020 due to pervasive discrimination and a litany of structural barriers that continue to stand in the way of economic security and upward mobility for disabled people in this country today.
Disabled people of color in the U.S. face even greater economic disparities and rates of poverty and hardship due to the compounding effects of structural as well as cultural ableism and racism. In just one example, the poverty rate among Black disabled adults was 28 percent in 2019, fully 10 percentage points higher than for white disabled adults.
Many of the persistent barriers to economic security facing Americans with disabilities are the result of policy failures that become visible when we center the perspectives and experiences of the disability community from inadequate affordable, accessible housing and transportation to a long history of disinvestment in community living supports and much, much more.
But despite the fact that 61 million, or more than one in four, U.S. adults live with disabilities in this country—numbers that are rapidly rising as the COVID-19 pandemic has already been the largest mass disabling event in modern history—to date, economic policy conversations in this country have rarely included a disability lens. People with disabilities have generally been an afterthought in our economic policymaking, much less at the table.
Now, new polling released today by The Century Foundation and another of our terrific partners in the Collaborative, Data for Progress, underscores how left behind the disability community feels after decades of being sidelined. Just one in three disabled voters—one in three—feel that leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities. Finally achieving disability economic justice in this country will require not only a redoubling of our national commitment to the unfulfilled goals of the ADA, but also a collective commitment to applying disability as a lens across the entire economic policy agenda, and an intentional acknowledgment that we will never achieve true economic justice in this nation if we fail to achieve economic justice for disabled people.
And that right there is the vision of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. A first of its kind initiative, it brings together two dozen leading disability organizations, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and drive a disability economic justice agenda.
In 2022, nearly 32 years after the ADA was signed into law, disability and poverty should not go hand in hand, and we can no longer afford to acknowledge the “unfinished business”—I put that in scare quotes—of the ADA once a year on its anniversary in July. Achieving long denied economic justice for disabled people in the U.S. will require centering the perspectives and expertise of disabled people across all of the nation’s economic policymaking. And I’m incredibly excited and humbled to work alongside the diverse array of remarkable policy leaders who make up the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative to finally make that a reality. You can find a full list of the founding members at DEJC.org.
Finally, a huge thanks to the Ford Foundation for being such an incredible partner and to everyone at The Century Foundation, especially our president Mark Zuckerman, whom we’ll be hearing from shortly, for TCF’s phenomenal commitment to this work.
And with that, I have the great pleasure of introducing our panel of distinguished guests, our first panel for today’s event, and welcoming them to the virtual stage, along with one of my very favorite co-conspirators and my co-moderator for our opening session, Rebecca Cokley of the Ford Foundation, whom I had the honor of founding the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress years ago, when we were the law firm of Vallas and Cokley, as many folks may remember. She now serves as the first ever program officer for U.S. disability rights at the Ford Foundation. Hi, Cokley. Come on stage.
We are also honored to have two incredible leaders who have, in many ways, paved the way for the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s very existence with us today as well, and I’m gonna welcome them to the virtual stage too. Julián Castro is the former Secretary of Housing & Urban Development under President Barack Obama. He now serves as the Klinsky Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress at Harvard Law School. Secretary Castro, thank you so much for being with us today.
SECRETARY JULIÁN CASTRO: Wonderful to be with you. Thanks for the invitation.
VALLAS: And Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who represents the 7th District of Massachusetts and really needs no introduction to the disability community because she’s become such an incredible leader, champion, and friend to the community. Congresswoman, thank you so much for being with us today as well.
REPRESENTATIVE AYANNA PRESSLEY: Great to be with you both. Well, with everyone! [laughs]
VALLAS: Well, and Cokley, it’s wonderful to get to share the virtual stage with you. We don’t spend nearly enough time together these days. I miss you. I miss being down the hall from you. But I’m gonna give you moderator’s privilege to ask the first question of our distinguished panel.
REBECCA COKLEY: Thank you so much, Vallas. So, distinguished panel members and friends, the disability community calls those that grew up at the nexus of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act the ADA generation: people who grew up with different expectations for disabled people around what access to school looks like, access to work, to health care, to society. We are now more than 30 years past the ADA, and we have a whole new generation of people with disabilities that have been created as a result of this pandemic and a whole generation of people with disabilities that have been impacted by the pandemic. But yet, every year, when we mark the anniversary of the ADA, folks are still being told, “Well, we still have this much further to go. There are still unmet goals.” We’re facing an economic crisis for disabled Americans, and we were still well before this pandemic. So, how do we ensure that we don’t go another 30 years only talking about the fight for disabled Americans and their families in July as the continued unfinished business?
VALLAS: And I think that’s a great question for both of you. Yeah.
COKLEY: Representative Pressley, do you wanna start? [laughs]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. Again, just wonderful to be with all of you. This is a long time coming and a historic moment. One moment while I digress and just say that I am a Black woman with a bald head, wearing a black blouse and pink lipstick and pearl hoop earrings. Okay.
Cokley, you’re exactly right. The disability community in America has faced systemic disenfranchisement in the form of policy violence really for generations, from unconscionable barriers to health care to income limits for those seeking accessible housing to barriers to marry whom you love. And my mother, may she rest in peace and power, told me often that to be born Black in America was to be born into struggle. And I extend that sentiment to those in the disability community as well. Daily, you are navigating and organizing for your humanity, even if you’re not an activist per se. And while there is certainly beauty in the struggle, when I think about a generation, when I think about the world we’re trying to create for our children, I dream of a life where they are defined by their joy and their freedom, and they are navigating a markedly more accessible world in every single sense.
And the COVID pandemic, you know, I forget who said it, Cokley, but there is that expression that, “We are not makers of history; we are shaped by it.” And so, we are, in this moment, the pandemic is shaping us, and it has really laid bare these pre-existing deep inequities and disparities, exacerbated them, and our community has experienced so many deep and painful losses. And policy, it’s my love language, and I fundamentally believe that in this moment, we must act with responsive policy as this pandemic is shaping us. And it has to be crafted in close proximity with those closest to the pain. The disability community, marginalized communities have been victimized and bore the burden of policy violence. We have been precise in that depression and oppression. I think we can legislate justice and healing in the same way that we have legislated marginalization. And again, for generations, policy has been used in that very exact way to advance discrimination.
And so, in this moment, we have to be just as precise in advancing policy that heals and advances, and we can’t shy away from governing moments. One way that we as folks, I think, in public life and in public office and as legislators, need to move to advance the promise of true disability justice is we have to push back against these unjust, false, binary choices. So often our community is asked to moderate our aspirations and ask for less or where we’re pitted against other marginalized communities. And what we need, I just reject the premise of these unjust binary choices. It’s money for Home and Community-Based Services and critical SSI reform. It’s housing justice that centers the disability community and free public transit that is accessible. It’s a federal jobs guarantee and addressing our broken criminal legal system. Our destinies are tied.
VALLAS: And Secretary Castro, same question to you. I think I will let you get in there as well.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. Well, first of all, let me say again to Rebecca, and Rebecca Cokley and Vallas, thank you so much for the invitation to be a part of this. To The Century Foundation and the Ford Foundation, congratulations on launching this collaborative. And it’s always a pleasure to be with Representative Pressley, who has been so inspiring to me and I know to so many others across our country. Thank you for participating.
I think that Representative Pressley said it very well that it’s past due that issues that touch upon the disability community receive greater attention, greater policy resources, a different way of looking at them, and also that we forge partnerships and allyships. And that’s why I’m so excited about this. I think your question was, how do we ensure that the next 32 years aren’t spent talking about unfinished business? One of the best ways that we can do that is to make sure that we forge these partnerships, forge these coalitions to get stronger and stronger in the political realm at every level: the federal level, of course, but also the state level and the local level.
I think about, just as one example, this moment that we’re in where Representative Pressley, Congress, and the President put forward a groundbreaking investment in infrastructure, and all of the decisions that are gonna be made in the coming months, years, and decades about how that money is spent and when that money is spent, whose lives it touches and impacts and boosts quality of life for and the role that policymakers, whether they come from the disability community or not, have in shaping inclusive investment in resources. I also think that this is something that is not only for the public sector to tackle, but also the private sector. And of course, y’all are setting a great example in the non-profit sector.
And sometimes I feel like in the progress that we need to make—and Representative Pressley, I think, touched on this as well—sometimes I feel like the biggest stumbling blocks are not only policy and politicians, but really, the culture that we live in. A culture that says that mental health issues are not the same as physical health issues. A culture that devalues the experience of people living with disabilities. A culture that too oftentimes is perfectly fine stigmatizing people with disabilities, laughing about people with disabilities in different ways. And that all of us as individuals, as human beings, and also in our roles, from people in Hollywood to people in the corridors, of course, of Congress, and on corporate boards have a responsibility to change that culture so that as that culture changes, we can make even bigger changes in policy and investment in resources. That’s what I look forward to, at least hope for, in the coming years.
VALLAS: Well, and Secretary Castro, I wanna stay with you for a moment because in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, for the first time in American political history, nearly, excuse me, every single Democratic candidate for president, every single one, released a disability plan during the primary campaign. And that was a particularly significant moment in American political history for the community. This was not something we had ever seen happen. And your proposal, your campaign plan was really one of the anchors of that primary season, really making important progress towards helping people understand that every issue was a disability issue. How do we move from campaign promises to finally achieving disability economic justice so that this economy finally works for disabled people?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. I was so happy to see the level of focus among the various Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 on justice for people with disabilities. And I think that that…hopefully, the work of all of those candidates serves as a blueprint for not only candidates, but most importantly, elected officials going forward. I know that it’s a part of the party platform, some of that is part of the party platforms, especially the Democratic Party, which is encouraging. To move on to the next level, the next phase of that, I think that it’s gonna take the whole gamut of how things change in a democracy. It’s gonna take the kind of partnerships that y’all are forging today and going forward. It’s gonna take all of the on-the-ground activism that is out there in local communities, in state legislatures, and in Washington, D.C.
And I think in this moment—and Representative Pressley referenced this as well—we’re in this very different moment for America still, as we work our way, hopefully toward the end of this pandemic, where I feel like everybody should have this sense that we’re all in this together. In their head must be implanted more of a sense of that at least than we were feeling three years ago, before this pandemic. And in that, you have an opportunity to move people’s hearts and minds to support changes to policy that affect the most vulnerable, that boost their quality of life and their economic mobility more than we have in decades. And so, I would just say that it’s gonna take all of that on-the-ground activism at every level.
It’s also not just on the disability community. This is really on all of us—and I speak about elected officials here—to go above and beyond your comfort zone oftentimes, to understand, to learn about, to challenge the notions even that you have sometimes, to educate yourself, and then to delve into the policy of it. And so, I think all of that, if we do those things, then we can see that those policy prescriptions actually become reality.
The last thing I’ll say is, of course, we’re dealing in a political environment, right, that is gonna dictate our ability to get a lot of these things done in the future. And I wish that I could say that we have two parties that are equally concerned about the concerns of the disability community. We have to work on both parties because the fact is that—everybody knows here this better than I do, that—people with disabilities come from every community and every ideology, every walk of life, in every state, red and blue. And that provides a hope that we can make progress even in the midst of a very polarized political situation in Washington. And I’m even more confident because of champions like Representative Pressley that I know are always there pressing the case, trying to make progress, trying to convince their colleagues on both sides of the aisle. That’s what we need.
VALLAS: And I should note that there is immense bipartisanship among voters when it comes to disability economic justice priorities. And that new polling I referenced before from The Century Foundation and Data for Progress just out today doesn’t just find that people with disabilities are feeling left behind, it also finds that there is immense widespread bipartisan support for all kinds of disability economic justice priorities. We just haven’t, as you’re noting, seen quite that level of support within the halls of power. So, just note to policymakers that the support is there among your voters on both sides. Cokley, do you wanna take the next question to Congresswoman Pressley?
COKLEY: Definitely. Congresswoman, I go back to actually, I can actually remember the day it was when our teams met up, when I was still at the Center for American Progress. And it was the day that your video dropped on The Root. And I remember sitting in the lobby of your office and watching the staff completely all abuzz with the responses coming in to the video where you discussed living with alopecia, and it was so ironic that we were sitting in that lobby waiting to meet with your team that day. And watching the response, watching the community welcome you with open arms was quite honestly one of the coolest moments and one of the moments that I was proudest of for my community. I mean, we had plotted all along. We’re like, statistically, someone in The Squad has to be a person with a disability. And I will say all along I was like, “I really hope it’s AP. I hope she’s ours.”
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: [laughs]
COKLEY: You know, we have our drafts. That’s how it works. And it was revolutionary the way that you self-identified as part of the community and the way that you have taken on meeting and engaging with the community in a really new way. You often talk about how policy is your love language, and I think one of the things that’s been really cool about the way that you and your team work is that you don’t see disability as like a short bus issue. It’s not just like, “This is the disability policy, and this is everything else.” The team is constantly thinking—I know your head is constantly thinking—about what are the disability issues around low-income housing? What are the disability issues in carceral reform? Can you talk a little bit about how you have built that mindset into how you craft policy?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. First, I do just wanna take a moment to offer some verbal flowers and effusive praise for Secretary Castro. Never take his leadership for granted. This is someone who moves with authenticity and intention in all things that he does. And so, we thank him for his leadership and being a pacesetter in this space. And it’s wonderful to be at this virtual table with him and to partner with him on so many issues.
I do wanna back up a little bit in terms of sort of how I come to this work and what has made me move with intention when it comes to bringing a disability lens to every issue. Prior to my election to Congress, where I’ve had the honor of serving for a little over three years now, I served on the Boston City Council. And although transportation is not a municipal issue per se—in terms of funding, it’s a state issue—it was an issue that I was leaning in on because transit justice is really at the intersect of every other issue. And I went to a member of the disability community, a disability justice advocate, and I asked to ride public transit with her. And a ride that should have taken 30 minutes took almost two hours, and it was because the elevators were broken and a host of other infrastructure failures, policy failures, budgetary, moral failures. And at the end of that commute, I cried openly. And I’m getting emotional thinking about it now because I felt such shame that members of my community that I had not seen were being relegated to second class citizenship and that these were civil rights violations happening in plain view. And that I had not been as intentional and inclusive in my movement building and my policy advocacy.
And so, that shifted a lot of things for me around making sure that I’m proximate so that I better understand the intersectionalities, the complexities, the nuances, the various identities. As a voter, I hate when an elected official single-issues me. And you know, we have to ask more of ourselves and of those who represent us. You can’t just come to Black America and talk about mass incarceration or come to the disability community and only talk about the ADA or come to the LGBTQA community and at the time, maybe you have spoken about marriage equality or trans rights, or the Latino community and just talk about immigration, or women and only talk about bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. We live in intersectionality, and I think for too long, the disability community and disability policy has really been treated as an add-on or an afterthought.
Again, when the reality is, if we take an intersectional approach to policymaking, disability and other aspects of identity and the way people show up in the world is really central, you know. The policy should be responsive to the needs of the people, and people have multiple identities. And so, we have to start with those who are marginalized, start with those who’ve been made vulnerable, start with those who’ve been sidelined, systematically left out of the conversation.
And then I’ll close here, Cokley, to your point about our carceral system. The other thing that matters is storytelling and narrative and discourse because that shapes policy. So, I can’t talk about intervening to ensure that a 15-year-old child in Michigan who would’ve been incarcerated during the pandemic for not participating in remote learning, I’m not going to erase out of her narrative that she is a member of the disability community, and that was a core part of her story and her lived experience. When we see the latest iteration of a iteration of police violence and brutality with a Black man, and we don’t, I tell the story that he is disabled, when we erase that from the storytelling, from the narrative, from the discourse, then that also doesn’t show up in our policymaking and in our advocacy. And so, we have to make plain how systems are intersect, fit, and overlap and marginalized and how policy is not a dusty book on a shelf. It’s not static. Policy is the difference, quite literally, between who lives and who dies and who thrives. So, I think it begins with being in proximity, bringing that lens to everything, and then in the storytelling and the narrative, which shapes the discourse, just understanding that we have to be inclusive in that and not erase out disability identity for many of these other marginalized experiences and injustices.
VALLAS: Congresswoman, I get chills every time you get talking about these issues. And we’ve got just a few minutes left, but I wanna stay with you. And then Secretary Castro, you’re gonna bring us home, so get ready. Congresswoman Pressley, so far, we’ve been discussing the unfinished business of the ADA, the importance of bringing a disability lens across all of our policymaking, especially our economic policymaking. But right now, this moment when we’re having this virtual discussion, this isn’t just any other year where we’re talking about the unfinished business of the ADA, right?
We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, much as many people are not acting that way. And we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has already yielded the largest mass disabling event in many of our lifetimes. And that’s due to, of course, long COVID. Congresswoman Pressley, you have been such a leader on this issue. You’ve been speaking out on behalf of folks with long COVID and elevating their voices. And people with disabilities across this country, including many folks with long COVID, are really feeling left behind, as we saw in that polling, but as we know through so many other means as well. How can leaders respond in this moment, this mass disabling prompt event, to finally listen to and hear and engage with disabled people instead of, as you’ve noted, allowing folks to be ignored and erased and shut out as they historically have been?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah. Well, I ran for office because I wanted to champion the needs of those that are historically ignored, left out, and left behind. And as I moved in and out of community and paid attention to organizing that was happening online, it was clear to me that the long hauler community was being left behind, and I wanted to make sure that it was not being ignored when it comes to our public health response. And the disability community, many advocates, including who’s with us today, said at the outset of the pandemic that this had the potential to be a mass disabling event. And so, it is certainly devastating to see that coming to pass. And it makes the case for everything from Home and Community-Based Services to paid leave. I can argue Medicare for All. I certainly think it makes the case for that. And I want those that’ve been struggling with long COVID, who have been told that their symptoms and experiences are imaginary, that what they have experienced is real, it is as real as they are. It is deserving and warrants a federal response. We have conservative estimates that the long hauler community could be as many as eight million people, and those are conservative estimates because we don’t have the data, which is something that I continue to push for.
But I’ve introduced legislation to meet the needs of long haulers, to have a federal response, to expand long COVID clinics through our health care providers who are providing those who have met the needs of the most marginalized, like our community health centers, to provide them with grants to ensure that anyone who’s struggling with these debilitating symptoms, which is grossly affecting one’s physical health and quality of life and our workforce, that they’re able to access the health care that they need in community. And so, I’m just gonna keep banging the drum on that. And again, I thank our leaders on the Disability Justice Committee for being the canaries in the coal mine early on, on that.
So, but I think at the end of the day, it’s time, as we move forward, that we can get away from these cruel and dated policies like the marriage penalty and imagine what would happen if we fully funded the IDEA. Even the best intended elected officials need to be held accountable. And in my view, daily, we need to organize to press for our full humanity to be recognized, for our rights to be codified in law, and moreover, implemented and funded. So, I’m not fighting for scraps. I’m fighting for liberation. And that is what is beautiful about this space that you have all came together. And I’m just honored to be a part of this collaborative.
VALLAS: I might have to steal that as the tagline for the Collaborative: “We’re not fighting for scraps. We’re fighting for liberation.” Thank you, Congresswoman Pressley for that.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let’s go! I’ll buy the first T-shirt! [laughs] Let’s go! Let’s go!
COKLEY: I was gonna say it’s time for some swag.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah! [laughs]
COKLEY: We need some swag with that on there.
Mr. Secretary, to take us home, I wanna pose that question to you. I think one of the things when I think about your campaign that was so historic was quite literally the day the plan dropped. A, you did something that only one other candidate did. You picked up the phone, and you called the people that worked on the plan. And you thanked them. And I remember I got a phone call from (210), and I didn’t answer it because my ex-best friend is from San Antonio. And I was like, “Why is this chick calling me?!” And then your team texted and were like, “Cokley, answer the phone. It’s the Secretary.” And I answered it, and you said, “Thank you.” And it blew me away. And then it was, “Now we wanna do a Twitter chat. Can we pull something together in 24 hours?” And it was like, “Give us 48! We can do it in 48.”
And I think one of the things that you and your team were so great about was getting to the community where they were, reaching out to the community and saying, hey, we’re not doing rallies. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Let me go to where disabled people are. Let me hop on Twitter. Let’s do something. Let’s pull in the Crip The Vote folks. Let’s actually have this really phenomenal conversation with Sandy Ho, you know? And that’s not typical, unfortunately. We recently found that only one in three disabled voters feel that their leaders in Washington care about the community. How can leaders respond in this moment, this historic mass disabling event, to finally listen to, respond, and engage with disabled people instead of sort of perpetuating the ongoing erasure that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about today?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Well, thanks for your kind words, Rebecca. I think that it starts with approaching public service as a public servant, as one who is there to serve others, to listen to others, to learn from others. I feel like, and don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of folks that do, including, of course, Representative Pressley do that. But I think that too oftentimes as politicians, we get caught up in another mode, which is a mode of dictating or assuming that we know what’s best. Or sometimes to give folks the benefit of the doubt, they’re so busy tackling different issues that they don’t pause enough to listen and to understand that the lived experiences of the people who, even if they have a heart to serve them, are so important to try and get to understand and to let that lead.
And that’s what we were trying to do in the campaign with how we approached our policy. It’s also, I think, the approach that some of the other candidates took and many elected officials do take right now. We need more of that. We need more people in policymaking and in the private sector who are in a position to make a difference to approach things in that way. I think that we also need to, again, seize this moment that we’re in, where we have more people in our country who are willing to look out for their neighbor to try and be inclusive, people just at an everyday level because of what we’ve just been through and seize that opportunity to forge partnerships, forge coalitions, push that on-the-ground activism, and make change happen.
One of my most unforgettable moments from when I was HUD Secretary was sitting in the audience in March of 2015 in Selma, Alabama as President Obama and the late Congressman John Lewis and others marked the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. And one of the things that President Obama said then about the civil rights movement that I think applies here is that there’s no denying that a lot of progress has been made. You know, 2015 was not 1965. But there’s also no denying that so much more has to be made. And so, to that unfinished business that we undoubtedly have, we need the hearts and minds and the hard work of people through all walks of life. And we need a reawakening of the needs of the disability community to thunder through the actions of people in power. That’s what I hope for.
VALLAS: I can’t think of better words to end this panel on. Secretary Castro, Congresswoman Pressley, thank you so, so, so much for being with us this morning to kick off this Collaborative, for your leadership, for your partnership, for being such friends of the community, and for being so wonderful to work with and having such fabulous staff. We have to give a shoutout to your incredible staff as well who are always there for us.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yes, Sarah Groh!
SECRETARY CASTRO: [chuckles]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let me just tell you, I’m just so very fortunate. But thank you all, and this was so special. And what an epic day, again, long time coming and looking forward to continuing to do the work of this unfinished business with you, Mr. Secretary.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Thank you.
VALLAS: Well, we look forward to working with both of you. So, we’re gonna send you off on your way and let you off the virtual stage. Rebecca Cokley, thank you so much for co-moderating this panel with me, for being in this work with us, and thank you to Ford as well. So, I think that’s all the time we’ve got for this panel right now.
But now it is my great pleasure to introduce my boss, Mark Zuckerman, president of The Century Foundation, who is gonna join us to share a little bit more about TCF’s incredible commitment to this work. Thank you so much, Mark, for being with us today, and take it away. The stage is yours.
MARK ZUCKERMAN: Thank you so much, Rebecca and Kim and Vilissa. I wanna say flat out that you three are the policy dream team doing Century and the community proud. So, thank you for everything that you’re doing. Now, welcome everyone. I’m so glad you could join us today. That was just an amazing conversation.
Today we build and honor really the work of a generation of advocates who came before us. For me, I worked for Congressman George Miller for many years and the remarkable Judy Heumann who grew up in a world where children with disabilities weren’t even permitted to attend public schools. They said that was wrong, and they made it right. So, yes, we’ve come a long way down the road, but we have miles and miles to go. That is the unfinished work of this effort that we’re launching today.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Century Foundation, we’re a progressive, independent think tank that drives policy change to improve people’s lives. We pursue economic, racial, gender, and now disability equity and justice for all people in the country, in education and in health care and in work. Our economic team at TCF has been doing remarkable work to build an economy that works for everyone. But we knew we were missing a critical piece of the economic justice work: the perspectives and experiences of 61 million people in this country with disabilities. We must ensure that the economy works for them, too. Right now, we are failing, and the economy is failing disabled people.
That’s why we are proud to announce the launch today of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, an effort that’s spearheaded by TCF’s very own Disability Economic Justice team. This work is so critical because it centers the unique perspectives and experiences of the disability community, enabling us here at Century and our collaborative partners to bring a disability-focused lens to all our work. Because, as you’ve heard from our opening panelists, every issue, every issue is a disability issue.
And of course, without our incredible partner, the Ford Foundation, this much needed work would not be possible. Our friends and colleagues at the Ford Foundation are leaders ensuring that disability rights are front and center in the philanthropy and non-profit world. The Ford Foundation is the first major philanthropy in the country to launch its own disability rights portfolio, and the wonderful Rebecca Cokley, who you’ve just heard from, is the first program officer to take the lead on this critical work.
I now have the pleasure to introduce Sarita Gupta, the vice president for U.S. Programs at the Ford Foundation, who can tell you more about Ford’s important work on disability rights and justice, and why the launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative couldn’t be coming at a more important time. Thank you so much for your leadership on this issue. And now I turn it over to you, Sarita.
SARITA GUPTA: Am I muted? Okay. Can you all hear me now? Perfect. Thank you, Mark and to the entire dream team at The Century Foundation for inviting Ford to join this exciting event today. I’m really thrilled to be here with you all. As a longtime workers’ rights and economic justice advocate, I have the privilege of working with some of you and others in the disability community to address a range of issues, including access to good quality jobs and fair wages and working conditions, and access to affordable long-term supports and services, and basically, the right to live and work with dignity, respect, and agency.
And even as I reflect on my years of work in the economic justice arena, it never felt like it was enough. We could always do so much more to really weave together and integrate the needs of the disability community and opportunities with the disability community in broader economic justice work, which is why this is so exciting; today is so exciting. It is long overdue for us to have such a collaborative where we can truly evolve and grow the work, support and deepen partnerships, and shift culture—as both Congresswoman Pressley and Secretary Castro named—and to meet the broad range of issues impacting the disability community. At the Ford Foundation, the U.S. disability rights work led by Rebecca Cokley is now part of our holistic U.S. programs portfolio, which is exciting and really a demonstration and expression of our growth and commitment to this work.
At the Ford Foundation, we believe in the inherent dignity of all people. Yet around the world, billions of people are excluded from full participation in the political, economic, and cultural systems that shape their lives. And we have learned over the last few years, in particular with leaders like Rebecca and others, the degree to which that exclusion has been experienced by people in the disability community. For us, we understand that disability and poverty are causes and consequences of each other, which is why the Ford Foundation, after much consultation from the disability community, is grounding our U.S. Disability Rights Program strategy in economic justice. There is no strategy that will be successful in eliminating poverty that fails to center disability. And so, to see the disability groups here at the table with our partners working to eradicate poverty is so exciting. This is a core goal of the work we’re trying to drive at Ford, and collaboratives like this can really serve as an example for how to truly weave a disability rights and justice-centric lens across any policy area.
Moving ahead, we need to continue to drive the message that people with disabilities are not just recipients of programs and services, but they’re also students, workers, contributors to the workforce and society. The need for support does not eliminate one’s power, one’s agency, one’s right to access the promises of the ADA for full participation, independent living, economic self-sufficiency, and equality of opportunity. I’m just thrilled and excited to be a part of this effort with all of you. Mark, I’m gonna turn it back over to you or to Rebecca. Thank you.
VALLAS: Thank you so much, Sarita. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are so lucky to have such an incredible partner in the Ford Foundation, and we are so grateful to everyone over there, you and to Rebecca Cokley and Darren Walker and everyone for your incredible partnership and support of this work. This truly, as Mark said, would not be happening if not for your partnership and support.
So, now I am thrilled to kick it over to our closing panel. And to do that, it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce my amazing colleagues on the Disability Economic Justice Team here at The Century Foundation. So, I’m gonna welcome them onto the virtual stage. They’re gonna be our co-moderators for this closing panel. Kim Knackstedt is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. She comes to us from the White House, where most recently, she served as the first-ever director of disability policy on the White House Domestic Policy Council, an exciting development in and of itself that that position was even created in the Biden administration. So, welcome Kim. And the amazing Vilissa Thompson, who also probably needs no introduction to this community. So thrilled to have Vilissa as a fellow here at The Century Foundation. Vilissa is the founder of Ramp Your Voice, among many other things, a licensed social worker, and really one of the preeminent thought leaders within the disability community at the intersection of race and gender.
Kim, Vilissa, I am so thrilled to bring you up to this stage to moderate our final panel, which features just a few of our phenomenal members of this collaborative: Micaela Connery, co-founder of The Kelsey; Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families; Mia Ives-Rublee, director of the Center for American Progress’s Disability Justice Initiative; Lisa McCorkell of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative; Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and last but certainly not least, Nancy Smith of Activating Change, which is a project at the Vera Institute of Justice. Kim, Vilissa, without further ado, I’m gonna hand it over to you, ladies, to bring us home.
VILISSA THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Rebecca, and thank you, everybody, for being here. This has been such an incredible event. As Rebecca said, my name’s Vilissa Thompson. I’m a fellow here at TCF, and I wanna give a visual description of myself before I pass it along to Kim. I am a light-skinned Black woman who is sitting in her wheelchair. I am wearing rectangle-shaped glasses. I have on a new color lip gloss. I’ve got on a long sleeve shirt, wearing silver hoop earrings, and my background is a sunny yellow.
KIM KNACKSTEDT: Okay. Thanks, Vilissa! This is Kim Knackstedt, and I’ll also give a visual description. I’m a blond woman with shoulder length hair. I’m wearing a white blazer with a black dress under it, and here in my office at TCF. I’m really, really excited to be here with you. I’ll send it back over to you, Vilissa, to kick us off.
THOMPSON: All right. So, in the interest of time, we wanted to hear from all of our amazing panelists. So, we’re just gonna to jump right in. If you have any questions, feel free to share them in the chat.
KNACKSTEDT: Perfect. So, our first question will go for you, Micaela. And again, Micaela’s with The Kelsey, and so feel free to tell us a little bit about that when you provide your answers. So, here’s our question, Micaela. Right now, just five percent of our federally funded affordable housing is required to be accessible. Accessible, affordable housing is critical to access to community and move out of segregated institutional settings. We delve into the barriers this presents to disabled Americans in the report released today, and a link to that report is in the chat. From your perspective, Micaela, in what ways must our national housing infrastructure change in order to increase economic opportunity and justice for people with disabilities?
MICAELA CONNERY: Thanks so much, Kim and Vilissa. I am Micaela Connery. I am a white woman with a brown ponytail, and my virtual background is a housing construction site in front of San Francisco’s City Hall with the logo The Kelsey. And The Kelsey is a San Francisco-based, not-for-profit advancing disability-forward housing solutions and also working to change the systems and policies so that those solutions can be possible at scale. And so, we are thrilled to be joining this Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, recognizing that access to housing is such an essential part of economic opportunity for all people, and especially for people with disabilities.
And Kim, to your question, for so many years, I think we’ve thought about two things as it comes to housing. We’ve thought about bare minimum code requirements, which we know is not even close to scratching the surface of the need. And we’ve really thought about housing that has been a slow iteration on the institutions that we worked so hard to close for so many years. And when the promise of Olmstead and Title II of the ADA came to fruition, we actually haven’t created the policy systems and funding mechanisms to realize that promise, to make that promise from right to reality.
And so, for us, we look at the fact that people with disabilities are more likely to face housing discrimination. They’re more likely to experience housing insecurity and cannot afford rent on SSI in a single U.S. market. Not a single city in the U.S. can you afford basic housing on SSI. These individuals are more likely to experience homelessness and more likely to experience housing insecurity as a result. And we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that a lack of access to affordable, accessible, inclusive housing had deathly consequences for people with disabilities who were forced to stay in congregate settings where they were more likely to contract COVID, or they were housing insecure or living in inadequate housing or cramped communities where they couldn’t even self-isolate or get the supports or services they needed while being forced to stay at home where they lived.
And so, this is, you know, Secretary Castro spoke: We have a real opportunity as we think about rebuilding our housing infrastructure in this moment in time to make sure building that housing infrastructure is inclusive of disabled individuals. And that actually, in doing so, we create better housing experiences for all people. We create housing that has deeper affordability, with better access to vouchers and better subsidies for extremely low-income and mixed-income housing. We create better access to Home and Community-Based Services that are housing-related services to make sure that people can find and retain and receive the services that they want in housing. Community-based housing isn’t limited to—I so appreciate the false binary—community-based housing isn’t something that’s only available to some people with disabilities. It is something, no matter what an individual’s support need is, they should be able to have the services and the housing access to live in the community of their choice.
And then those solutions look like things like increased leadership at HUD focused on housing for people with disabilities and increased leadership of disabled people within our state, federal, and local housing agencies and within our housing development and policy community. It includes policies like subsidies, vouchers, and access to incentives that support people to go beyond the minimum abhorrent code requirements that we need to make code. But that is a minimum. That is a floor. That is not what our goal should be. And we need incentives and funding mechanisms in our federal and state programs to support meeting that.
And we need to rethink what truly inclusive disability-forward housing looks like. We need to stop saying we’re gonna tweak the institution and just sort of make mini-institutions or build the same models that we’ve tried to end for years and go to proximal to individuals with disabilities and ask them, “What does housing look like? And how, if we created something from scratch, could we create those communities that meet that need?” So, we’re excited to do this work in partnership with this collaborative and our allies in this field.
KNACKSTEDT: Amazing. And I love how you said that it’s the floor, not the actual goal. I think that’s such a great way to put it, where so often that we think of it as that’s the goal versus the flipped way around. And we need to still raise that standard, even as is. So, really, really loved your answer there. Vilissa, I’ll turn it over to you for the next question.
THOMPSON: Great. So, our next panelist would be Jocelyn Frye at the National Partnership for Women and Families. Jocelyn, one in four Americans have a disability, or approximately 61 million people across this nation. We know that number is rapidly growing too. Often in policy work, we see disability siloed, separated away from discussions of racial and gender equity. Can you talk about why the National Partnership thinks it is important to bring a disability lens across your work and why you joined the Collaborative? Why is it important to apply an intersectional lens, including race, gender, and disability to economic policymaking?
JOCELYN FRYE: Well, thank you so much, Vilissa, for the question, and I too will start with a visual description. I’m a Black woman. I have dark brown/black hair with a little more gray than I care to admit. I’m wearing a red top, and I’m sitting in my living room or dining room, rather, with a backdrop of our bookcases, and wearing my favorite pearls. And it’s great to be on this dynamic panel.
I think where I would start is simply say we’re part of the Collaborative because we really couldn’t not be a part of the Collaborative. And say that we are working on policy to improve women’s lives, which has been the long mission of the National Partnership. One of the things that we are very clear about, and I think Secretary Castro and Representative Pressley were so powerful in saying, is that we have to do our work at the intersections. Women don’t live single issue lives, and they don’t have single identities. They have multiple identities. And part of the history of some work in the women’s community has been, in many ways, too narrow in pushing different communities to the side. It’s what I call sort of policymaking premised on different segments of the community in the shadows, and that we treat as afterthoughts.
If we’re really going to do the work of gender justice, if we’re really going to focus on economic justice, then we have to bring sort of a race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. So, we’re here because we have to be here to be committed to our work, and we do the work intersectionally because we have to do it if we’re going to be true to a mission that really is committed to lifting the experiences and the economic security of women and people of all genders. So, that’s part of the reason that we’re here.
I think the second thing is that we know that our economy works only when you include women in that conversation. And you have to center women, and I would say women of color in particular at the beginning, if you’re really trying to think through, how are we going to drive our economy, grow our economy, and make sure that it works for everybody and make sure that we have a nation that actually is making full use of all of its potential? And I think, as others have said at the outset, is too often, we forget about folks with disabilities. We bring them in at the end and sort of try to have makeshift solutions that we hope work for them.
And I think the thing that we know is that if you start with folks who experience multiple barriers, and you solve for their problems, then the solutions that you are coming up with are solutions that have broader reach, right? So, there’s a, it’s not just a theoretical strategy, there’s a method of making sure that you are putting folks who have multiple barriers, who are women of color with disabilities, at the heart of that conversation about what does it mean to grow our economy? That actually accomplishes the work of actually figuring out what are the policies and strategies that can help all of us? So, it’s essential, if we are committed to really trying to deal with economic justice, to be more inclusive and to bring that race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. [bright theme music returns]
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s show, Off-Kilter is powered by The Century Foundation and produced by We Act Radio, with a special shoutout to executive producer Troy Miller and his merry band of farm animals, and the indefatigable Abby Grimshaw. Transcripts, which help us make the show accessible, are courtesy of Cheryl Green and her fabulous feline coworker. Find us every week on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. And for the superfans, you can find a full archive of all past episodes and show transcripts over at TCF.org/Off-Kilter. Got an idea for a topic you’d like to hear us unpack or a guest you’ve been wanting to hear on the show? Send us a note at [email protected]. Or if social media is more your bag, give us a holler on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And if you like what we do here at Off-Kilter Enterprises, send us some love by hitting that subscribe button and rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts to help other folks find the pod. It really does help. Thanks again for listening and see you next week.
[bright theme music]
REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): Welcome to Off-Kilter, the show about poverty, inequality, and everything they intersect with, powered by The Century Foundation. I’m Rebecca Vallas. This week we’re taking a break from Off-Kilter’s regularly scheduled programing to share a special virtual discussion hosted at The Century Foundation earlier this week with Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, Secretary Julián Castro, and other leaders to mark the official launch of what’s called the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
We previewed the Collaborative launch a few weeks ago in a special behind-the-scenes episode with The Century Foundation’s new Disability Economic Justice team, and it brings together two dozen leading disability groups, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and finally break the link between disability and poverty that continues to persist in the U.S. more than three decades after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law. You can find the full event and all the materials discussed during it at DEJC.org. Let’s take a listen. [upbeat music break]
Welcome everyone. And on behalf of The Century Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and all of the Collaborative’s founding members, thank you all so much for joining us today for the official launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
My name is Rebecca Vallas. I’m a senior fellow here at The Century Foundation, where I’m proud to lead TCF’s Disability Economic Justice team, which officially launched in March of this year with the amazing Kim Knackstedt and Vilissa Thompson, whom you’ll get to hear from later during today’s event. It’s my distinct honor and privilege to serve as your emcee during today’s virtual event.
A few quick housekeeping notes before we get to the good stuff. We’d love for all of you to participate in today’s event by using the chat function. And our hope is, time permitting, to have a little time for questions at the end of the closing panel. You can also join us on Twitter by following @DEJCollab—that’s C O L L AB—and you can use the hashtag #DisabilityEconomicJustice to join the conversation as well. And finally, today’s event has an ASL interpreter pinned to the screen, as well as live captioning. If anyone experiences any problems with either of those, please send a message to the hosts in the chat so we can get that sorted out. And thank you to our interpreters and to our captioner for being with us today.
As a new report released today by The Century Foundation and the Center for Economic Policy Research finds, America’s disability community is facing a persistent economic crisis, an economic crisis that long predates the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 31 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, became law, people with disabilities in the United States still face poverty rates twice as high as non-disabled people and were paid just 74 cents for every dollar paid to non-disabled workers in 2020 due to pervasive discrimination and a litany of structural barriers that continue to stand in the way of economic security and upward mobility for disabled people in this country today.
Disabled people of color in the U.S. face even greater economic disparities and rates of poverty and hardship due to the compounding effects of structural as well as cultural ableism and racism. In just one example, the poverty rate among Black disabled adults was 28 percent in 2019, fully 10 percentage points higher than for white disabled adults.
Many of the persistent barriers to economic security facing Americans with disabilities are the result of policy failures that become visible when we center the perspectives and experiences of the disability community from inadequate affordable, accessible housing and transportation to a long history of disinvestment in community living supports and much, much more.
But despite the fact that 61 million, or more than one in four, U.S. adults live with disabilities in this country—numbers that are rapidly rising as the COVID-19 pandemic has already been the largest mass disabling event in modern history—to date, economic policy conversations in this country have rarely included a disability lens. People with disabilities have generally been an afterthought in our economic policymaking, much less at the table.
Now, new polling released today by The Century Foundation and another of our terrific partners in the Collaborative, Data for Progress, underscores how left behind the disability community feels after decades of being sidelined. Just one in three disabled voters—one in three—feel that leaders in Washington care about people with disabilities. Finally achieving disability economic justice in this country will require not only a redoubling of our national commitment to the unfulfilled goals of the ADA, but also a collective commitment to applying disability as a lens across the entire economic policy agenda, and an intentional acknowledgment that we will never achieve true economic justice in this nation if we fail to achieve economic justice for disabled people.
And that right there is the vision of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. A first of its kind initiative, it brings together two dozen leading disability organizations, think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other, work in partnership, and drive a disability economic justice agenda.
In 2022, nearly 32 years after the ADA was signed into law, disability and poverty should not go hand in hand, and we can no longer afford to acknowledge the “unfinished business”—I put that in scare quotes—of the ADA once a year on its anniversary in July. Achieving long denied economic justice for disabled people in the U.S. will require centering the perspectives and expertise of disabled people across all of the nation’s economic policymaking. And I’m incredibly excited and humbled to work alongside the diverse array of remarkable policy leaders who make up the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative to finally make that a reality. You can find a full list of the founding members at DEJC.org.
Finally, a huge thanks to the Ford Foundation for being such an incredible partner and to everyone at The Century Foundation, especially our president Mark Zuckerman, whom we’ll be hearing from shortly, for TCF’s phenomenal commitment to this work.
And with that, I have the great pleasure of introducing our panel of distinguished guests, our first panel for today’s event, and welcoming them to the virtual stage, along with one of my very favorite co-conspirators and my co-moderator for our opening session, Rebecca Cokley of the Ford Foundation, whom I had the honor of founding the Disability Justice Initiative at the Center for American Progress years ago, when we were the law firm of Vallas and Cokley, as many folks may remember. She now serves as the first ever program officer for U.S. disability rights at the Ford Foundation. Hi, Cokley. Come on stage.
We are also honored to have two incredible leaders who have, in many ways, paved the way for the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s very existence with us today as well, and I’m gonna welcome them to the virtual stage too. Julián Castro is the former Secretary of Housing & Urban Development under President Barack Obama. He now serves as the Klinsky Professor of Practice for Leadership and Progress at Harvard Law School. Secretary Castro, thank you so much for being with us today.
SECRETARY JULIÁN CASTRO: Wonderful to be with you. Thanks for the invitation.
VALLAS: And Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, who represents the 7th District of Massachusetts and really needs no introduction to the disability community because she’s become such an incredible leader, champion, and friend to the community. Congresswoman, thank you so much for being with us today as well.
REPRESENTATIVE AYANNA PRESSLEY: Great to be with you both. Well, with everyone! [laughs]
VALLAS: Well, and Cokley, it’s wonderful to get to share the virtual stage with you. We don’t spend nearly enough time together these days. I miss you. I miss being down the hall from you. But I’m gonna give you moderator’s privilege to ask the first question of our distinguished panel.
REBECCA COKLEY: Thank you so much, Vallas. So, distinguished panel members and friends, the disability community calls those that grew up at the nexus of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act the ADA generation: people who grew up with different expectations for disabled people around what access to school looks like, access to work, to health care, to society. We are now more than 30 years past the ADA, and we have a whole new generation of people with disabilities that have been created as a result of this pandemic and a whole generation of people with disabilities that have been impacted by the pandemic. But yet, every year, when we mark the anniversary of the ADA, folks are still being told, “Well, we still have this much further to go. There are still unmet goals.” We’re facing an economic crisis for disabled Americans, and we were still well before this pandemic. So, how do we ensure that we don’t go another 30 years only talking about the fight for disabled Americans and their families in July as the continued unfinished business?
VALLAS: And I think that’s a great question for both of you. Yeah.
COKLEY: Representative Pressley, do you wanna start? [laughs]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. Again, just wonderful to be with all of you. This is a long time coming and a historic moment. One moment while I digress and just say that I am a Black woman with a bald head, wearing a black blouse and pink lipstick and pearl hoop earrings. Okay.
Cokley, you’re exactly right. The disability community in America has faced systemic disenfranchisement in the form of policy violence really for generations, from unconscionable barriers to health care to income limits for those seeking accessible housing to barriers to marry whom you love. And my mother, may she rest in peace and power, told me often that to be born Black in America was to be born into struggle. And I extend that sentiment to those in the disability community as well. Daily, you are navigating and organizing for your humanity, even if you’re not an activist per se. And while there is certainly beauty in the struggle, when I think about a generation, when I think about the world we’re trying to create for our children, I dream of a life where they are defined by their joy and their freedom, and they are navigating a markedly more accessible world in every single sense.
And the COVID pandemic, you know, I forget who said it, Cokley, but there is that expression that, “We are not makers of history; we are shaped by it.” And so, we are, in this moment, the pandemic is shaping us, and it has really laid bare these pre-existing deep inequities and disparities, exacerbated them, and our community has experienced so many deep and painful losses. And policy, it’s my love language, and I fundamentally believe that in this moment, we must act with responsive policy as this pandemic is shaping us. And it has to be crafted in close proximity with those closest to the pain. The disability community, marginalized communities have been victimized and bore the burden of policy violence. We have been precise in that depression and oppression. I think we can legislate justice and healing in the same way that we have legislated marginalization. And again, for generations, policy has been used in that very exact way to advance discrimination.
And so, in this moment, we have to be just as precise in advancing policy that heals and advances, and we can’t shy away from governing moments. One way that we as folks, I think, in public life and in public office and as legislators, need to move to advance the promise of true disability justice is we have to push back against these unjust, false, binary choices. So often our community is asked to moderate our aspirations and ask for less or where we’re pitted against other marginalized communities. And what we need, I just reject the premise of these unjust binary choices. It’s money for Home and Community-Based Services and critical SSI reform. It’s housing justice that centers the disability community and free public transit that is accessible. It’s a federal jobs guarantee and addressing our broken criminal legal system. Our destinies are tied.
VALLAS: And Secretary Castro, same question to you. I think I will let you get in there as well.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. Well, first of all, let me say again to Rebecca, and Rebecca Cokley and Vallas, thank you so much for the invitation to be a part of this. To The Century Foundation and the Ford Foundation, congratulations on launching this collaborative. And it’s always a pleasure to be with Representative Pressley, who has been so inspiring to me and I know to so many others across our country. Thank you for participating.
I think that Representative Pressley said it very well that it’s past due that issues that touch upon the disability community receive greater attention, greater policy resources, a different way of looking at them, and also that we forge partnerships and allyships. And that’s why I’m so excited about this. I think your question was, how do we ensure that the next 32 years aren’t spent talking about unfinished business? One of the best ways that we can do that is to make sure that we forge these partnerships, forge these coalitions to get stronger and stronger in the political realm at every level: the federal level, of course, but also the state level and the local level.
I think about, just as one example, this moment that we’re in where Representative Pressley, Congress, and the President put forward a groundbreaking investment in infrastructure, and all of the decisions that are gonna be made in the coming months, years, and decades about how that money is spent and when that money is spent, whose lives it touches and impacts and boosts quality of life for and the role that policymakers, whether they come from the disability community or not, have in shaping inclusive investment in resources. I also think that this is something that is not only for the public sector to tackle, but also the private sector. And of course, y’all are setting a great example in the non-profit sector.
And sometimes I feel like in the progress that we need to make—and Representative Pressley, I think, touched on this as well—sometimes I feel like the biggest stumbling blocks are not only policy and politicians, but really, the culture that we live in. A culture that says that mental health issues are not the same as physical health issues. A culture that devalues the experience of people living with disabilities. A culture that too oftentimes is perfectly fine stigmatizing people with disabilities, laughing about people with disabilities in different ways. And that all of us as individuals, as human beings, and also in our roles, from people in Hollywood to people in the corridors, of course, of Congress, and on corporate boards have a responsibility to change that culture so that as that culture changes, we can make even bigger changes in policy and investment in resources. That’s what I look forward to, at least hope for, in the coming years.
VALLAS: Well, and Secretary Castro, I wanna stay with you for a moment because in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election, for the first time in American political history, nearly, excuse me, every single Democratic candidate for president, every single one, released a disability plan during the primary campaign. And that was a particularly significant moment in American political history for the community. This was not something we had ever seen happen. And your proposal, your campaign plan was really one of the anchors of that primary season, really making important progress towards helping people understand that every issue was a disability issue. How do we move from campaign promises to finally achieving disability economic justice so that this economy finally works for disabled people?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Yeah. I was so happy to see the level of focus among the various Democratic presidential candidates in 2020 on justice for people with disabilities. And I think that that…hopefully, the work of all of those candidates serves as a blueprint for not only candidates, but most importantly, elected officials going forward. I know that it’s a part of the party platform, some of that is part of the party platforms, especially the Democratic Party, which is encouraging. To move on to the next level, the next phase of that, I think that it’s gonna take the whole gamut of how things change in a democracy. It’s gonna take the kind of partnerships that y’all are forging today and going forward. It’s gonna take all of the on-the-ground activism that is out there in local communities, in state legislatures, and in Washington, D.C.
And I think in this moment—and Representative Pressley referenced this as well—we’re in this very different moment for America still, as we work our way, hopefully toward the end of this pandemic, where I feel like everybody should have this sense that we’re all in this together. In their head must be implanted more of a sense of that at least than we were feeling three years ago, before this pandemic. And in that, you have an opportunity to move people’s hearts and minds to support changes to policy that affect the most vulnerable, that boost their quality of life and their economic mobility more than we have in decades. And so, I would just say that it’s gonna take all of that on-the-ground activism at every level.
It’s also not just on the disability community. This is really on all of us—and I speak about elected officials here—to go above and beyond your comfort zone oftentimes, to understand, to learn about, to challenge the notions even that you have sometimes, to educate yourself, and then to delve into the policy of it. And so, I think all of that, if we do those things, then we can see that those policy prescriptions actually become reality.
The last thing I’ll say is, of course, we’re dealing in a political environment, right, that is gonna dictate our ability to get a lot of these things done in the future. And I wish that I could say that we have two parties that are equally concerned about the concerns of the disability community. We have to work on both parties because the fact is that—everybody knows here this better than I do, that—people with disabilities come from every community and every ideology, every walk of life, in every state, red and blue. And that provides a hope that we can make progress even in the midst of a very polarized political situation in Washington. And I’m even more confident because of champions like Representative Pressley that I know are always there pressing the case, trying to make progress, trying to convince their colleagues on both sides of the aisle. That’s what we need.
VALLAS: And I should note that there is immense bipartisanship among voters when it comes to disability economic justice priorities. And that new polling I referenced before from The Century Foundation and Data for Progress just out today doesn’t just find that people with disabilities are feeling left behind, it also finds that there is immense widespread bipartisan support for all kinds of disability economic justice priorities. We just haven’t, as you’re noting, seen quite that level of support within the halls of power. So, just note to policymakers that the support is there among your voters on both sides. Cokley, do you wanna take the next question to Congresswoman Pressley?
COKLEY: Definitely. Congresswoman, I go back to actually, I can actually remember the day it was when our teams met up, when I was still at the Center for American Progress. And it was the day that your video dropped on The Root. And I remember sitting in the lobby of your office and watching the staff completely all abuzz with the responses coming in to the video where you discussed living with alopecia, and it was so ironic that we were sitting in that lobby waiting to meet with your team that day. And watching the response, watching the community welcome you with open arms was quite honestly one of the coolest moments and one of the moments that I was proudest of for my community. I mean, we had plotted all along. We’re like, statistically, someone in The Squad has to be a person with a disability. And I will say all along I was like, “I really hope it’s AP. I hope she’s ours.”
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: [laughs]
COKLEY: You know, we have our drafts. That’s how it works. And it was revolutionary the way that you self-identified as part of the community and the way that you have taken on meeting and engaging with the community in a really new way. You often talk about how policy is your love language, and I think one of the things that’s been really cool about the way that you and your team work is that you don’t see disability as like a short bus issue. It’s not just like, “This is the disability policy, and this is everything else.” The team is constantly thinking—I know your head is constantly thinking—about what are the disability issues around low-income housing? What are the disability issues in carceral reform? Can you talk a little bit about how you have built that mindset into how you craft policy?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Sure. First, I do just wanna take a moment to offer some verbal flowers and effusive praise for Secretary Castro. Never take his leadership for granted. This is someone who moves with authenticity and intention in all things that he does. And so, we thank him for his leadership and being a pacesetter in this space. And it’s wonderful to be at this virtual table with him and to partner with him on so many issues.
I do wanna back up a little bit in terms of sort of how I come to this work and what has made me move with intention when it comes to bringing a disability lens to every issue. Prior to my election to Congress, where I’ve had the honor of serving for a little over three years now, I served on the Boston City Council. And although transportation is not a municipal issue per se—in terms of funding, it’s a state issue—it was an issue that I was leaning in on because transit justice is really at the intersect of every other issue. And I went to a member of the disability community, a disability justice advocate, and I asked to ride public transit with her. And a ride that should have taken 30 minutes took almost two hours, and it was because the elevators were broken and a host of other infrastructure failures, policy failures, budgetary, moral failures. And at the end of that commute, I cried openly. And I’m getting emotional thinking about it now because I felt such shame that members of my community that I had not seen were being relegated to second class citizenship and that these were civil rights violations happening in plain view. And that I had not been as intentional and inclusive in my movement building and my policy advocacy.
And so, that shifted a lot of things for me around making sure that I’m proximate so that I better understand the intersectionalities, the complexities, the nuances, the various identities. As a voter, I hate when an elected official single-issues me. And you know, we have to ask more of ourselves and of those who represent us. You can’t just come to Black America and talk about mass incarceration or come to the disability community and only talk about the ADA or come to the LGBTQA community and at the time, maybe you have spoken about marriage equality or trans rights, or the Latino community and just talk about immigration, or women and only talk about bodily autonomy and reproductive freedom. We live in intersectionality, and I think for too long, the disability community and disability policy has really been treated as an add-on or an afterthought.
Again, when the reality is, if we take an intersectional approach to policymaking, disability and other aspects of identity and the way people show up in the world is really central, you know. The policy should be responsive to the needs of the people, and people have multiple identities. And so, we have to start with those who are marginalized, start with those who’ve been made vulnerable, start with those who’ve been sidelined, systematically left out of the conversation.
And then I’ll close here, Cokley, to your point about our carceral system. The other thing that matters is storytelling and narrative and discourse because that shapes policy. So, I can’t talk about intervening to ensure that a 15-year-old child in Michigan who would’ve been incarcerated during the pandemic for not participating in remote learning, I’m not going to erase out of her narrative that she is a member of the disability community, and that was a core part of her story and her lived experience. When we see the latest iteration of a iteration of police violence and brutality with a Black man, and we don’t, I tell the story that he is disabled, when we erase that from the storytelling, from the narrative, from the discourse, then that also doesn’t show up in our policymaking and in our advocacy. And so, we have to make plain how systems are intersect, fit, and overlap and marginalized and how policy is not a dusty book on a shelf. It’s not static. Policy is the difference, quite literally, between who lives and who dies and who thrives. So, I think it begins with being in proximity, bringing that lens to everything, and then in the storytelling and the narrative, which shapes the discourse, just understanding that we have to be inclusive in that and not erase out disability identity for many of these other marginalized experiences and injustices.
VALLAS: Congresswoman, I get chills every time you get talking about these issues. And we’ve got just a few minutes left, but I wanna stay with you. And then Secretary Castro, you’re gonna bring us home, so get ready. Congresswoman Pressley, so far, we’ve been discussing the unfinished business of the ADA, the importance of bringing a disability lens across all of our policymaking, especially our economic policymaking. But right now, this moment when we’re having this virtual discussion, this isn’t just any other year where we’re talking about the unfinished business of the ADA, right?
We’re still in the middle of a pandemic, much as many people are not acting that way. And we’re still in the middle of a pandemic that has already yielded the largest mass disabling event in many of our lifetimes. And that’s due to, of course, long COVID. Congresswoman Pressley, you have been such a leader on this issue. You’ve been speaking out on behalf of folks with long COVID and elevating their voices. And people with disabilities across this country, including many folks with long COVID, are really feeling left behind, as we saw in that polling, but as we know through so many other means as well. How can leaders respond in this moment, this mass disabling prompt event, to finally listen to and hear and engage with disabled people instead of, as you’ve noted, allowing folks to be ignored and erased and shut out as they historically have been?
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah. Well, I ran for office because I wanted to champion the needs of those that are historically ignored, left out, and left behind. And as I moved in and out of community and paid attention to organizing that was happening online, it was clear to me that the long hauler community was being left behind, and I wanted to make sure that it was not being ignored when it comes to our public health response. And the disability community, many advocates, including who’s with us today, said at the outset of the pandemic that this had the potential to be a mass disabling event. And so, it is certainly devastating to see that coming to pass. And it makes the case for everything from Home and Community-Based Services to paid leave. I can argue Medicare for All. I certainly think it makes the case for that. And I want those that’ve been struggling with long COVID, who have been told that their symptoms and experiences are imaginary, that what they have experienced is real, it is as real as they are. It is deserving and warrants a federal response. We have conservative estimates that the long hauler community could be as many as eight million people, and those are conservative estimates because we don’t have the data, which is something that I continue to push for.
But I’ve introduced legislation to meet the needs of long haulers, to have a federal response, to expand long COVID clinics through our health care providers who are providing those who have met the needs of the most marginalized, like our community health centers, to provide them with grants to ensure that anyone who’s struggling with these debilitating symptoms, which is grossly affecting one’s physical health and quality of life and our workforce, that they’re able to access the health care that they need in community. And so, I’m just gonna keep banging the drum on that. And again, I thank our leaders on the Disability Justice Committee for being the canaries in the coal mine early on, on that.
So, but I think at the end of the day, it’s time, as we move forward, that we can get away from these cruel and dated policies like the marriage penalty and imagine what would happen if we fully funded the IDEA. Even the best intended elected officials need to be held accountable. And in my view, daily, we need to organize to press for our full humanity to be recognized, for our rights to be codified in law, and moreover, implemented and funded. So, I’m not fighting for scraps. I’m fighting for liberation. And that is what is beautiful about this space that you have all came together. And I’m just honored to be a part of this collaborative.
VALLAS: I might have to steal that as the tagline for the Collaborative: “We’re not fighting for scraps. We’re fighting for liberation.” Thank you, Congresswoman Pressley for that.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let’s go! I’ll buy the first T-shirt! [laughs] Let’s go! Let’s go!
COKLEY: I was gonna say it’s time for some swag.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yeah! [laughs]
COKLEY: We need some swag with that on there.
Mr. Secretary, to take us home, I wanna pose that question to you. I think one of the things when I think about your campaign that was so historic was quite literally the day the plan dropped. A, you did something that only one other candidate did. You picked up the phone, and you called the people that worked on the plan. And you thanked them. And I remember I got a phone call from (210), and I didn’t answer it because my ex-best friend is from San Antonio. And I was like, “Why is this chick calling me?!” And then your team texted and were like, “Cokley, answer the phone. It’s the Secretary.” And I answered it, and you said, “Thank you.” And it blew me away. And then it was, “Now we wanna do a Twitter chat. Can we pull something together in 24 hours?” And it was like, “Give us 48! We can do it in 48.”
And I think one of the things that you and your team were so great about was getting to the community where they were, reaching out to the community and saying, hey, we’re not doing rallies. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. Let me go to where disabled people are. Let me hop on Twitter. Let’s do something. Let’s pull in the Crip The Vote folks. Let’s actually have this really phenomenal conversation with Sandy Ho, you know? And that’s not typical, unfortunately. We recently found that only one in three disabled voters feel that their leaders in Washington care about the community. How can leaders respond in this moment, this historic mass disabling event, to finally listen to, respond, and engage with disabled people instead of sort of perpetuating the ongoing erasure that we’ve spent a lot of time talking about today?
SECRETARY CASTRO: Well, thanks for your kind words, Rebecca. I think that it starts with approaching public service as a public servant, as one who is there to serve others, to listen to others, to learn from others. I feel like, and don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of folks that do, including, of course, Representative Pressley do that. But I think that too oftentimes as politicians, we get caught up in another mode, which is a mode of dictating or assuming that we know what’s best. Or sometimes to give folks the benefit of the doubt, they’re so busy tackling different issues that they don’t pause enough to listen and to understand that the lived experiences of the people who, even if they have a heart to serve them, are so important to try and get to understand and to let that lead.
And that’s what we were trying to do in the campaign with how we approached our policy. It’s also, I think, the approach that some of the other candidates took and many elected officials do take right now. We need more of that. We need more people in policymaking and in the private sector who are in a position to make a difference to approach things in that way. I think that we also need to, again, seize this moment that we’re in, where we have more people in our country who are willing to look out for their neighbor to try and be inclusive, people just at an everyday level because of what we’ve just been through and seize that opportunity to forge partnerships, forge coalitions, push that on-the-ground activism, and make change happen.
One of my most unforgettable moments from when I was HUD Secretary was sitting in the audience in March of 2015 in Selma, Alabama as President Obama and the late Congressman John Lewis and others marked the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. And one of the things that President Obama said then about the civil rights movement that I think applies here is that there’s no denying that a lot of progress has been made. You know, 2015 was not 1965. But there’s also no denying that so much more has to be made. And so, to that unfinished business that we undoubtedly have, we need the hearts and minds and the hard work of people through all walks of life. And we need a reawakening of the needs of the disability community to thunder through the actions of people in power. That’s what I hope for.
VALLAS: I can’t think of better words to end this panel on. Secretary Castro, Congresswoman Pressley, thank you so, so, so much for being with us this morning to kick off this Collaborative, for your leadership, for your partnership, for being such friends of the community, and for being so wonderful to work with and having such fabulous staff. We have to give a shoutout to your incredible staff as well who are always there for us.
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Yes, Sarah Groh!
SECRETARY CASTRO: [chuckles]
CONGRESSWOMAN PRESSLEY: Let me just tell you, I’m just so very fortunate. But thank you all, and this was so special. And what an epic day, again, long time coming and looking forward to continuing to do the work of this unfinished business with you, Mr. Secretary.
SECRETARY CASTRO: Thank you.
VALLAS: Well, we look forward to working with both of you. So, we’re gonna send you off on your way and let you off the virtual stage. Rebecca Cokley, thank you so much for co-moderating this panel with me, for being in this work with us, and thank you to Ford as well. So, I think that’s all the time we’ve got for this panel right now.
But now it is my great pleasure to introduce my boss, Mark Zuckerman, president of The Century Foundation, who is gonna join us to share a little bit more about TCF’s incredible commitment to this work. Thank you so much, Mark, for being with us today, and take it away. The stage is yours.
MARK ZUCKERMAN: Thank you so much, Rebecca and Kim and Vilissa. I wanna say flat out that you three are the policy dream team doing Century and the community proud. So, thank you for everything that you’re doing. Now, welcome everyone. I’m so glad you could join us today. That was just an amazing conversation.
Today we build and honor really the work of a generation of advocates who came before us. For me, I worked for Congressman George Miller for many years and the remarkable Judy Heumann who grew up in a world where children with disabilities weren’t even permitted to attend public schools. They said that was wrong, and they made it right. So, yes, we’ve come a long way down the road, but we have miles and miles to go. That is the unfinished work of this effort that we’re launching today.
For those of you that aren’t familiar with The Century Foundation, we’re a progressive, independent think tank that drives policy change to improve people’s lives. We pursue economic, racial, gender, and now disability equity and justice for all people in the country, in education and in health care and in work. Our economic team at TCF has been doing remarkable work to build an economy that works for everyone. But we knew we were missing a critical piece of the economic justice work: the perspectives and experiences of 61 million people in this country with disabilities. We must ensure that the economy works for them, too. Right now, we are failing, and the economy is failing disabled people.
That’s why we are proud to announce the launch today of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, an effort that’s spearheaded by TCF’s very own Disability Economic Justice team. This work is so critical because it centers the unique perspectives and experiences of the disability community, enabling us here at Century and our collaborative partners to bring a disability-focused lens to all our work. Because, as you’ve heard from our opening panelists, every issue, every issue is a disability issue.
And of course, without our incredible partner, the Ford Foundation, this much needed work would not be possible. Our friends and colleagues at the Ford Foundation are leaders ensuring that disability rights are front and center in the philanthropy and non-profit world. The Ford Foundation is the first major philanthropy in the country to launch its own disability rights portfolio, and the wonderful Rebecca Cokley, who you’ve just heard from, is the first program officer to take the lead on this critical work.
I now have the pleasure to introduce Sarita Gupta, the vice president for U.S. Programs at the Ford Foundation, who can tell you more about Ford’s important work on disability rights and justice, and why the launch of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative couldn’t be coming at a more important time. Thank you so much for your leadership on this issue. And now I turn it over to you, Sarita.
SARITA GUPTA: Am I muted? Okay. Can you all hear me now? Perfect. Thank you, Mark and to the entire dream team at The Century Foundation for inviting Ford to join this exciting event today. I’m really thrilled to be here with you all. As a longtime workers’ rights and economic justice advocate, I have the privilege of working with some of you and others in the disability community to address a range of issues, including access to good quality jobs and fair wages and working conditions, and access to affordable long-term supports and services, and basically, the right to live and work with dignity, respect, and agency.
And even as I reflect on my years of work in the economic justice arena, it never felt like it was enough. We could always do so much more to really weave together and integrate the needs of the disability community and opportunities with the disability community in broader economic justice work, which is why this is so exciting; today is so exciting. It is long overdue for us to have such a collaborative where we can truly evolve and grow the work, support and deepen partnerships, and shift culture—as both Congresswoman Pressley and Secretary Castro named—and to meet the broad range of issues impacting the disability community. At the Ford Foundation, the U.S. disability rights work led by Rebecca Cokley is now part of our holistic U.S. programs portfolio, which is exciting and really a demonstration and expression of our growth and commitment to this work.
At the Ford Foundation, we believe in the inherent dignity of all people. Yet around the world, billions of people are excluded from full participation in the political, economic, and cultural systems that shape their lives. And we have learned over the last few years, in particular with leaders like Rebecca and others, the degree to which that exclusion has been experienced by people in the disability community. For us, we understand that disability and poverty are causes and consequences of each other, which is why the Ford Foundation, after much consultation from the disability community, is grounding our U.S. Disability Rights Program strategy in economic justice. There is no strategy that will be successful in eliminating poverty that fails to center disability. And so, to see the disability groups here at the table with our partners working to eradicate poverty is so exciting. This is a core goal of the work we’re trying to drive at Ford, and collaboratives like this can really serve as an example for how to truly weave a disability rights and justice-centric lens across any policy area.
Moving ahead, we need to continue to drive the message that people with disabilities are not just recipients of programs and services, but they’re also students, workers, contributors to the workforce and society. The need for support does not eliminate one’s power, one’s agency, one’s right to access the promises of the ADA for full participation, independent living, economic self-sufficiency, and equality of opportunity. I’m just thrilled and excited to be a part of this effort with all of you. Mark, I’m gonna turn it back over to you or to Rebecca. Thank you.
VALLAS: Thank you so much, Sarita. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We are so lucky to have such an incredible partner in the Ford Foundation, and we are so grateful to everyone over there, you and to Rebecca Cokley and Darren Walker and everyone for your incredible partnership and support of this work. This truly, as Mark said, would not be happening if not for your partnership and support.
So, now I am thrilled to kick it over to our closing panel. And to do that, it is my great pleasure and honor to introduce my amazing colleagues on the Disability Economic Justice Team here at The Century Foundation. So, I’m gonna welcome them onto the virtual stage. They’re gonna be our co-moderators for this closing panel. Kim Knackstedt is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. She comes to us from the White House, where most recently, she served as the first-ever director of disability policy on the White House Domestic Policy Council, an exciting development in and of itself that that position was even created in the Biden administration. So, welcome Kim. And the amazing Vilissa Thompson, who also probably needs no introduction to this community. So thrilled to have Vilissa as a fellow here at The Century Foundation. Vilissa is the founder of Ramp Your Voice, among many other things, a licensed social worker, and really one of the preeminent thought leaders within the disability community at the intersection of race and gender.
Kim, Vilissa, I am so thrilled to bring you up to this stage to moderate our final panel, which features just a few of our phenomenal members of this collaborative: Micaela Connery, co-founder of The Kelsey; Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families; Mia Ives-Rublee, director of the Center for American Progress’s Disability Justice Initiative; Lisa McCorkell of the Patient-Led Research Collaborative; Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and Disability Policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities; and last but certainly not least, Nancy Smith of Activating Change, which is a project at the Vera Institute of Justice. Kim, Vilissa, without further ado, I’m gonna hand it over to you, ladies, to bring us home.
VILISSA THOMPSON: Thank you so much, Rebecca, and thank you, everybody, for being here. This has been such an incredible event. As Rebecca said, my name’s Vilissa Thompson. I’m a fellow here at TCF, and I wanna give a visual description of myself before I pass it along to Kim. I am a light-skinned Black woman who is sitting in her wheelchair. I am wearing rectangle-shaped glasses. I have on a new color lip gloss. I’ve got on a long sleeve shirt, wearing silver hoop earrings, and my background is a sunny yellow.
KIM KNACKSTEDT: Okay. Thanks, Vilissa! This is Kim Knackstedt, and I’ll also give a visual description. I’m a blond woman with shoulder length hair. I’m wearing a white blazer with a black dress under it, and here in my office at TCF. I’m really, really excited to be here with you. I’ll send it back over to you, Vilissa, to kick us off.
THOMPSON: All right. So, in the interest of time, we wanted to hear from all of our amazing panelists. So, we’re just gonna to jump right in. If you have any questions, feel free to share them in the chat.
KNACKSTEDT: Perfect. So, our first question will go for you, Micaela. And again, Micaela’s with The Kelsey, and so feel free to tell us a little bit about that when you provide your answers. So, here’s our question, Micaela. Right now, just five percent of our federally funded affordable housing is required to be accessible. Accessible, affordable housing is critical to access to community and move out of segregated institutional settings. We delve into the barriers this presents to disabled Americans in the report released today, and a link to that report is in the chat. From your perspective, Micaela, in what ways must our national housing infrastructure change in order to increase economic opportunity and justice for people with disabilities?
MICAELA CONNERY: Thanks so much, Kim and Vilissa. I am Micaela Connery. I am a white woman with a brown ponytail, and my virtual background is a housing construction site in front of San Francisco’s City Hall with the logo The Kelsey. And The Kelsey is a San Francisco-based, not-for-profit advancing disability-forward housing solutions and also working to change the systems and policies so that those solutions can be possible at scale. And so, we are thrilled to be joining this Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, recognizing that access to housing is such an essential part of economic opportunity for all people, and especially for people with disabilities.
And Kim, to your question, for so many years, I think we’ve thought about two things as it comes to housing. We’ve thought about bare minimum code requirements, which we know is not even close to scratching the surface of the need. And we’ve really thought about housing that has been a slow iteration on the institutions that we worked so hard to close for so many years. And when the promise of Olmstead and Title II of the ADA came to fruition, we actually haven’t created the policy systems and funding mechanisms to realize that promise, to make that promise from right to reality.
And so, for us, we look at the fact that people with disabilities are more likely to face housing discrimination. They’re more likely to experience housing insecurity and cannot afford rent on SSI in a single U.S. market. Not a single city in the U.S. can you afford basic housing on SSI. These individuals are more likely to experience homelessness and more likely to experience housing insecurity as a result. And we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic that a lack of access to affordable, accessible, inclusive housing had deathly consequences for people with disabilities who were forced to stay in congregate settings where they were more likely to contract COVID, or they were housing insecure or living in inadequate housing or cramped communities where they couldn’t even self-isolate or get the supports or services they needed while being forced to stay at home where they lived.
And so, this is, you know, Secretary Castro spoke: We have a real opportunity as we think about rebuilding our housing infrastructure in this moment in time to make sure building that housing infrastructure is inclusive of disabled individuals. And that actually, in doing so, we create better housing experiences for all people. We create housing that has deeper affordability, with better access to vouchers and better subsidies for extremely low-income and mixed-income housing. We create better access to Home and Community-Based Services that are housing-related services to make sure that people can find and retain and receive the services that they want in housing. Community-based housing isn’t limited to—I so appreciate the false binary—community-based housing isn’t something that’s only available to some people with disabilities. It is something, no matter what an individual’s support need is, they should be able to have the services and the housing access to live in the community of their choice.
And then those solutions look like things like increased leadership at HUD focused on housing for people with disabilities and increased leadership of disabled people within our state, federal, and local housing agencies and within our housing development and policy community. It includes policies like subsidies, vouchers, and access to incentives that support people to go beyond the minimum abhorrent code requirements that we need to make code. But that is a minimum. That is a floor. That is not what our goal should be. And we need incentives and funding mechanisms in our federal and state programs to support meeting that.
And we need to rethink what truly inclusive disability-forward housing looks like. We need to stop saying we’re gonna tweak the institution and just sort of make mini-institutions or build the same models that we’ve tried to end for years and go to proximal to individuals with disabilities and ask them, “What does housing look like? And how, if we created something from scratch, could we create those communities that meet that need?” So, we’re excited to do this work in partnership with this collaborative and our allies in this field.
KNACKSTEDT: Amazing. And I love how you said that it’s the floor, not the actual goal. I think that’s such a great way to put it, where so often that we think of it as that’s the goal versus the flipped way around. And we need to still raise that standard, even as is. So, really, really loved your answer there. Vilissa, I’ll turn it over to you for the next question.
THOMPSON: Great. So, our next panelist would be Jocelyn Frye at the National Partnership for Women and Families. Jocelyn, one in four Americans have a disability, or approximately 61 million people across this nation. We know that number is rapidly growing too. Often in policy work, we see disability siloed, separated away from discussions of racial and gender equity. Can you talk about why the National Partnership thinks it is important to bring a disability lens across your work and why you joined the Collaborative? Why is it important to apply an intersectional lens, including race, gender, and disability to economic policymaking?
JOCELYN FRYE: Well, thank you so much, Vilissa, for the question, and I too will start with a visual description. I’m a Black woman. I have dark brown/black hair with a little more gray than I care to admit. I’m wearing a red top, and I’m sitting in my living room or dining room, rather, with a backdrop of our bookcases, and wearing my favorite pearls. And it’s great to be on this dynamic panel.
I think where I would start is simply say we’re part of the Collaborative because we really couldn’t not be a part of the Collaborative. And say that we are working on policy to improve women’s lives, which has been the long mission of the National Partnership. One of the things that we are very clear about, and I think Secretary Castro and Representative Pressley were so powerful in saying, is that we have to do our work at the intersections. Women don’t live single issue lives, and they don’t have single identities. They have multiple identities. And part of the history of some work in the women’s community has been, in many ways, too narrow in pushing different communities to the side. It’s what I call sort of policymaking premised on different segments of the community in the shadows, and that we treat as afterthoughts.
If we’re really going to do the work of gender justice, if we’re really going to focus on economic justice, then we have to bring sort of a race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. So, we’re here because we have to be here to be committed to our work, and we do the work intersectionally because we have to do it if we’re going to be true to a mission that really is committed to lifting the experiences and the economic security of women and people of all genders. So, that’s part of the reason that we’re here.
I think the second thing is that we know that our economy works only when you include women in that conversation. And you have to center women, and I would say women of color in particular at the beginning, if you’re really trying to think through, how are we going to drive our economy, grow our economy, and make sure that it works for everybody and make sure that we have a nation that actually is making full use of all of its potential? And I think, as others have said at the outset, is too often, we forget about folks with disabilities. We bring them in at the end and sort of try to have makeshift solutions that we hope work for them.
And I think the thing that we know is that if you start with folks who experience multiple barriers, and you solve for their problems, then the solutions that you are coming up with are solutions that have broader reach, right? So, there’s a, it’s not just a theoretical strategy, there’s a method of making sure that you are putting folks who have multiple barriers, who are women of color with disabilities, at the heart of that conversation about what does it mean to grow our economy? That actually accomplishes the work of actually figuring out what are the policies and strategies that can help all of us? So, it’s essential, if we are committed to really trying to deal with economic justice, to be more inclusive and to bring that race/gender/disability lens to the conversation. [bright theme music returns]
VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s show, Off-Kilter is powered by The Century Foundation and produced by We Act Radio, with a special shoutout to executive producer Troy Miller and his merry band of farm animals, and the indefatigable Abby Grimshaw. Transcripts, which help us make the show accessible, are courtesy of Cheryl Green and her fabulous feline coworker. Find us every week on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your pods. And for the superfans, you can find a full archive of all past episodes and show transcripts over at TCF.org/Off-Kilter. Got an idea for a topic you’d like to hear us unpack or a guest you’ve been wanting to hear on the show? Send us a note at [email protected]. Or if social media is more your bag, give us a holler on Twitter @OffKilterShow. And if you like what we do here at Off-Kilter Enterprises, send us some love by hitting that subscribe button and rating and reviewing the show on Apple Podcasts to help other folks find the pod. It really does help. Thanks again for listening and see you next week.
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