The national coordinator of initiatives converging around the ADA Legacy Project is Mark Johnson, Director of Advocacy at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta. Mark has been a long time leader in ADAPT and was involved in helping to organize the Tenth Anniversary Spirit of ADA Torch Relay that involved 24 cities. Shortly before the Obama presidency, a number of disability network leaders gathered in Boston to discuss the future of the disability rights movement. They screened a movie, Lives Worth Living, which was aired on PBS in 2011. Another outcome of the discussions was the Justice for All Network, which evolved into the National Disability Leadership Alliance with 14 consumer-led disability organizations. (http://www.disabilityleadership.org)
At a screening of the Life Worth Living documentary in Atlanta, discussions began about how to improve preservation efforts related to the disability rights movement. That discussion broadened to include documentarians, museum curators, and government officials trying to determine who was already preserving content and educating for the future. Those discussions led to a summit and formation of the ADA Legacy Project in 2012 with the three major goals to Preserve, Educate, and Celebrate. Its website was launched in 2013. (http://www.adalegacy.com)
The ADA Legacy Bus Tour began in 2014. The group then discovered that the Faircount Media Group, a publishing firm that specializes in anniversary publications, had already begun to solicit sponsors and writers for an ADA Anniversary book, funded by advertisements. That led to collaboration with the ADA Legacy Project and now the online availability of the book at the ADA Legacy Project: http://www.adalegacy.com/official-ada25-publication.
As the ADA Project has evolved, it has grown in two ways: (1) inviting other disability groups to participate and (2) welcoming other organizations that have self-identified as interested and wanting to be involved. Those include the Smithsonian Museum and the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, both of who were planning activities during July and around the weekend of the 25th Anniversary. Mark’s role as Chair of the ADA Legacy Project is done through his job as Advocacy Director at the Shepherd Center in Atlanta. His role has primarily been one of helping to connect organizations with each other and to help coordinate the overall activities so that initiatives build off one another. The ADA Legacy Project is working not because it is responding to people’s requests to do this or that but by inviting interested parties to develop their own ideas and projects in collaboration with the wide, loose consortium of people and organizations who have already jumped in.
That led to some of us related to the national Collaborative on Faith and Disability to collect and produce resources that can be used and/or adapted by any faith community or network that would like to develop their own programming and celebration. The resources are also available for people with disabilities, families, friends, and professionals to take to their own congregation. The Interfaith Disability Advocacy Network of the American Association of Persons with Disabilities is also urging faith communities to participate. They have developed a Pledge to Recommit to Full Implementation of the ADA and Accessible, Welcoming Faith Communities that can be adopted by any faith organization. They are also planning an interfaith service of celebration in Washington. D.C. on the weekend of the celebrations there, July 25-26. http://www.aapd.com/what-we-do/interfaith/
The ADA Legacy Project as a whole is funded by organizations, individuals and companies who want to get involved, with many levels of contribution possible from $25 to $50,000. The most important contribution is the work and action that individuals, organizations, and communities are committing themselves to doing. The financial contributions are being used to pay for Project coordination, the ADA Legacy Bus Tour, web site development, and communications professionals until November. Afterwards, the project plans to continue to be a clearinghouse, develop other Preserve, Celebrate, and Educate partnerships, and assist with the Legacy phase of the disability rights mobile museum that is currently in the initial planning stages.
For more information, explore the ADA Legacy website: http://www.adalegacy.com, other websites listed above or visit us on Facebook. Or contact Bill Gaventa at bill.gaventa@gmail.com or Curtis Ramsey-Lucas at Curtis.Ramsey-Lucas@aapd.com.
If your faith organization or network develops other materials and resources for this, and you would like to share them with others, please send us a copy and let us know what you are doing.