Keeping the Promise of the ADA: Unequal Justice for Disabled Victims of Murder

Lydia Brown is being honored as a Champion of Change for  embodying the next generation of leadership within the disability community and her commitment to the promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Generations of disability rights activists, in bipartisan partnership with policymakers, have made great strides toward fulfilling the ADA’s promises of equality of opportunity, full participation in society, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency. Yet keeping the promise of the ADA also means confronting the difficult and uncomfortable reality that people with disabilities continue to be disproportionately victimized by abuse and violence.

Since I began advocating for disability justice in 2009, I have learned that violence has permeated every part of disability history. People with disabilities were targeted for elimination during the Holocaust under Nazi Germany, forcibly sterilized under the Constitution in Buck v. Bell (1927), a decision that has never been overturned, and repeatedly rejected for life-saving organ transplants solely on the basis of disability without any legitimate medical reason.

Are the names Daniel Leubner, Angelica Auriemma, and George Hodgins familiar to you? If you don’t know their stories, I suggest you google them. Each of these people were killed by those that were supposed to care for them, and in each case, the victim’s disability was the motivating factor in the commission of the crime. Daniel, Angelica, and George were all autistic, as I am. The horror of their murders is regularly compounded by dehumanizing and devaluing rhetoric, empathy for the aggressors rather than the victims, and misrepresentation in the media, in public discourse, and in policymaking discussions.

I have testified against the abuses by the Judge Rotenberg Center in my home state of Massachusetts, where six residents with disabilities died because of violent aversive “treatments.” I have written proposed legislation in Massachusetts demanding a regulatory response to continued police brutality that has caused the deaths of fellow autistic Americans. I have campaigned against the use of restraints and seclusions in school, which have been cited many times by the U.S. Government Accountability Office in testimony before Congress as the cause of death for many students with disabilities.

Hate crimes against people with disabilities demand a response from all communities in order to combat the insidious attitude that our lives are less valuable and not worth fighting for. As long as people like me can be killed for the crime of inhabiting atypical bodies and minds and as long as those responsible can escape any real consequences for their crimes, neither I nor my children nor my children’s children will be free to achieve equality of access and opportunity.

The specter of violence remains an enormous obstacle to equal rights for Americans with disabilities. Until we begin to have serious discussions about the ramifications of violence against people with disabilities and what we can do to implement policies and foster communities that respect and affirm people with disabilities, these realities will remain ensconced in shadows. How do you get rid of shadows? Expose them to the light. That’s what true champions of change have always done and, together, we’ll do the same here.

Lydia Brown is the Undersecretary for Disability Affairs in the Georgetown University Student Association and Project Assistant for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network.

Civic Hacking Our Way to a Better Government and Stronger Democracy

Steve Spiker is being honored as a Champion of Change  for applying his tech skills for civic good.

I’m an immigrant. I may not look like it, but I came to the USA for love and I’ve grown to seriously love this country in spite of its flaws. I’ve been blessed to work for a social justice organization (Urban Strategies Council) in Oakland, California, and have loved serving the city and its residents.  I’ve devoted myself to helping make data-driven decisions a reality but have realized the parallel need for more civic engagement on behalf of our city and our residents. I’m also a tech geek and have benefited from proximity to the amazing people of the Bay Area tech community.

Despite all the great efforts of many community-based organizations and government agencies, we haven’t made much of a dent in poverty and inequity in the Bay Area. My reaction to this failure is that we must do things differently and do them better if we want to see social change. A big piece of this change is that our cities must become more open, more engaged, and more agile.  At the core of so much failure is the way we strategically use (or don’t use) data and technology in local government.

Being part of the civic innovation community has been an amazing and humbling experience. It has taught me that there are always others with ideas as good, or better, than my own. The diverse members of OpenOakland, our volunteer organization that I co-founded with Eddie Tejeda in 2012, represent a broad group of technologists, activists, researchers, designers, and residents who believe that our city can and must be better. We’re working to build better interfaces to government that make interaction with government simple and painless. We’re leading the way with effective public-private partnerships and with collaborations that gently move our government to a more accessible, more agile, future.

Great work has been done in other cities to make governments more open and  effective and I’ve shamelessly sought to bring those great practices home to Oakland. I’m not the most creative person in the world. I’ve been called an innovator but really I just find great solutions that others have invented and apply them to our local problems. This is the heart of civic hacking for me: building new solutions and processes to replace broken ones, sharing our lessons and our successes and allowing others to benefit from our knowledge, failures, and shared technology. The way open-source technology is created lends itself incredibly well to the way we recreate our cities — openly, collaboratively, and for the good of all.

Through OpenOakland we’ve begun work reshaping civic engagement through our CityCamp Oakland and supported civic hacking efforts with our Open Data Day and Code for Oakland Hackathons. More recently we held an incredible collaborative event called ReWrite Oakland as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking where over 70 people worked together to build something new and creative for our city.  In one day our community and the city together built a system called Oakland Answers- a new way of helping residents find the information they want. The system, built on open source technology first developed in Honolulu, gives people a Google style search interface that helps them find simply written content fast and painlessly.

I’m proud to be part of the Code For America family and to have such a strong network of leaders and doers across the country who are working to transform government to be truly by the people, for the people. We need to restore trust in government and respect for public service — to create a strong platform on which to build our future. I think we’re slowly moving the needle on this in Oakland.

Steve Spiker is the Director of Research & Technology at the Urban Strategies Council

Technology-Enabled Volunteers Ending Hunger and Food Waste in Austin

George Luc is being honored as a Champion of Change for applying his tech skills for civic good.

I believe that if you show people the problems and you show them the solutions they will be moved to act. - Bill Gates

Eleven months ago I set out to build a platform that would encourage everyone in the world to volunteer. Together with my co-founder, James McGirr, we created GivePulse, a social network that matches people in our community with causes they care about while enabling easy organization, management and mobilization of volunteers and supporters. From day one our mission has been to solve tough social problems through the use of technology. Keeping true to our mission, today our civic engagement platform supports hundreds of causes and universities such as the University of Texas at Austin and St. Edwards University.

Through our partnership with St. Edwards University, I was introduced to David Waldron, VP of IT at St. Edwards University, and Claire Dunn, Coordinator of IT Communications. Our discussions led to many collaborative opportunities that sought to improve the Austin community. One prominent opportunity ignited our excitement, a civic hackathon hosted by St. Edwards University to enable local technologists to hack for Austin causes.

The National Day of Civic Hacking provides the ideal atmosphere for connecting people with technological needs (for nonprofits and for social good) with programmers and hackers that can provide solutions. At the ATX Hackathon for Change 2013 a passionate social activist explained his problem and inspired us to act.

To kick off the event, representatives from local groups and causes started pitching their technical challenges. Hackers, social entrepreneurs, volunteers, supporters, reporters -- everyone was there. On one of the last pitches, James and I looked at each other and we knew we had found our match. The person pitching was Randy Rosens, founder of Keep Austin Fed. He gave a compelling and passionate 60-second pitch about ending hunger and food waste.  Randy explained how he wanted a better online calendar for scheduling volunteers to rescue fresh healthy food and deliver it to specific charities. However, it immediately occurred to us that it wasn’t just a calendar that would solve the problem, it had to be a simple way for food donors to contact volunteers to rescue food before it was thrown away and wasted.

After learning more about Keep Austin Fed’s needs we realized that what he had proposed as the hack was only a small piece of the whole solution. It was time to bring his organization into the 21st century.

The ideal solution required a number of moving parts. We would need to create a website for Keep Austin Fed, a texting service for restaurants to communicate with volunteers, and a backend reporting system for Keep Austin Fed to manage and keep track of all of the transactions, volunteers and donations.

During the two day event we built and designed the website (hosted by Rackspace, one of the event sponsors) enabling food donors, such as restaurants and bakeries, recipients, such as shelters and charities, and volunteers to join a Mobile Texting Food Rescue Service that we built using Twilio (another of the event sponsors). The way our solution works is that after food donors are approved, they are given a unique donor code and are told to text a phone number with their code, followed with a brief description of the food they need rescued. Keep Austin Fed then mobilizes available volunteers to deliver the meals to those in hunger. All the data about donors, volunteers, recipients, and the communication of how much food is rescued, where it was delivered, and who delivered it, is tracked automatically with the integrations between the website, Twilio and the backend system (SugarCRM).

After spending countless hours coding and drinking coffee interspersed with energy drinks you would think that our mental and emotional state would have begun to decline. That just wasn’t the case. As we saw our efforts and hard work begin to coalesce into a fully functional solution for Keep Austin Fed, our energy levels and excitement continued to grow. As a matter of fact, during the hackathon Keep Austin Fed and the service we created was able to help rescue over 500 meals to provide hunger relief for hundreds of Austinites in those two days alone.

As we reflect upon the hackathon, our mission to promote works of social good through technology was fulfilled. Every week, we directly and indirectly feed hundreds of hungry Austinites and save tons of food from the dumpster. If two hackers are able to make such an impact in just 48 hours, think how powerful it could be with an army of hackers!

Thank you, White House, for making this possible. Thank you, St. Edwards University, for bringing the National Day of Civic Hacking to Austin. Thank you, Randy and the Keep Austin Fed family, for believing in us. And thank you, Austin, for providing a home and platform to end hunger and food waste here in the Lone Star State and beyond.

The Civic Hackathon is over. But to end hunger, food waste and empower social good at a massive scale, our hacking must continue. Hack On!

George Luc is the Co-Founder and CEO of GivePulse