Adding disabilities to the diversity discussion

Adding disabilities to the diversity discussion is the goal of Tiffany Yu.  At the age of 9, Tiffany was injured in a car accident and would spend three weeks in the hospital after breaking a couple of bones in her leg and suffering brachial plexus palsy, severe nerve damage in her right arm.  While the bones in her leg healed, she still does not have use of her arm.

In her senior year at Georgetown University, Tiffany was participating in a conversation on diversity as part of her Resident Assistant training.  She could not help but notice that nobody was talking about disabilities.  She wanted to get people of all abilities talking and thinking about disability by fostering an ongoing conversation about it, in the same way we talk about gender and race equality.

Tiffany's vision would become reality, when she served on a student panel at the "Accessing Differences: New Politics and Pedagogies of Disability", a conference at Georgetown University.  Tiffany presented the idea for a program to encourage discussion about disability, and received overwhelming support for the idea from the audience.  With a little more work, in Spring 2009, Diversability was launched at Goergetown, with a two part goal of a) wanting to raise disability awareness on campus and b) wanting to reshape current conceptions of what it means to have a disability. 

Diversability continued to flourish up until last year, becoming an organization officially recognized by Geourgetown University's Student Activities Commission.  The conversation at Georgetown continues today, although without Diversability.  Tiffany believes it is time to bring back Diversability, beyond campus to the community at large, and she is starting in her current home town of New York City.  The mission is to raise awareness and reshape conceptions, and currently, Diversability is doing this by hosting events and other programmering and partnering with other organizations in order to get more people talking and thinking about disability.  As Tiffany notes, everyone needs to be involved in the conversation for society to change attitudes. 

The first event Diversability will be holding since their relaunch is Diversability: An Evening Celebrating Diversity & Disability.  For those not in New York City, participants will be able to watch the panel discussion via live stream.  People are also invited to take their pledge, promising to support efforts to make society more inclusive and fight discrimination against people with disabilities.    I have taken the pledge.  Won't you join me?