Disability Pride Month

Disability Pride Month is celebrated every July in honor of the ADA anniversary and it is something that should be recognized by everyone in the world regardless of ability.

Despite all the gloom and sadness in the world today, it is an incredible time to live with a disability and tremendous progress is slowly but surely happening.

The disabled employment rate is making record gains and will keep climbing because of things such as remote work.

We have been able to save money without losing our benefits because of ABLE Accounts for almost a decade. For more information about how to open one please visit the ABLE National Resource Center

The government has invested billions in making transit stations accessible, passed a major law and rule for air travel accessibility, expanded access to healthcare, and made significant improvements to Medicare just in the last 2 years.

Incredible new technology that can change our lives, such as self-driving cars and robots, are being created.

These are incredible gains, but ableism is still rampant and our community has so much work ahead to fight it and make the world more accessible.

The ADA was the biggest piece of civil rights legislation since the 1960's and it showed how tremendous change can still happen if we work together.

Other countries around the world look to us as an example of how accessible a country could be. We still have so many accessibility problems left to tackle, but the US is significantly ahead of everyone else and that is something to be incredibly prideful of.

Believing the government can improve society is a big part of who I am because of my experience watching Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy advocacy accomplish big things on our mission to find a cure and working for more than a decade on making air travel more accessible witnessing firsthand how change gets made.

There are several pieces of legislation pending in Congress that could soon pass that would be enormous for us such as the Savings Penalty Elimination Act which would raise the SSI Asset Limit for the first time since 1984 (You can ask your representatives to support it on the MDA Advocacy Website) and the Transformation to Competitive Integrated Employment Act which would end the subminimum wage.

No matter what happens in the election there is much more progress we can achieve as a nation.

The ABLE Act passed just 11 years ago and it passed overwhelmingly in a divisive political environment just like that today.

We sadly lost one of the biggest heroes in the disability community who played a key role in all the major disability legislation of the last 50 years last year when Judy Heumann passed away. She is surely missed because she showed us all how one individual can dramatically transform the nation for all disabled Americans.

Let’s each find pride in overcoming our disabilities and being part of an amazing community looking to make the world more accessible and inclusive.