“…people with IDD are often excluded from decisions made about their own lives, and from big picture decisions about how to build support systems that actually work.”
To elevate awareness and ignite action around our community’s social, economic, and environmental issues, we periodically feature local thought leaders to enhance the stories and data analyzed in our Boulder County TRENDS Report. This month, we’re pleased to feature Ailsa Wonnacott, Executive Director, Association For Community Living – a grantee of the foundation’s Community Trust.
The Association for Community Living (ACL) is the Arc Chapter serving Boulder and Broomfield counties. We provide advocacy for people with Intellectual or Developmental Disabilities (IDD), public policy advocacy, and building our community’s capacity for inclusion through training and technical assistance.
People with IDD, their families, and their allies have been actively engaged in a human rights movement for decades, and advocacy organizations like ACL – and the national Arc network – are an integral part of this movement. We’ve come a long way since the days of forced institutionalization, denial of public education, and lack of community-based healthcare ,and other services and supports; and from the silence that permitted horrendous crimes to be committed against people with IDD.
We also have a long way to go before people with IDD are fully included in community life:
One in 65 people in the United States have IDD, yet only half of these people are known to the systems that exist to support them. To this day, people with IDD are 4 to 10 times more likely to be the victims of crime; children with disabilities are 3 to 4 times more likely to be abused; 83% of women and 32% of men are the victims of sexual assault; and people with IDD are also disproportionately represented in our prison population and juvenile corrections systems – although they do not commit more crimes.
The powerful idea “nothing about us without us” drives a self-advocate movement of people with IDD who know who they are, what they want their lives and their communities to look, what they have to contribute to the world, and what they need to fully participate in their community. And yet, people with IDD are often excluded from decisions made about their own lives, and from big picture decisions about how to build support systems that actually work.
Experts create systems that are hard for people to navigate, and funding streams that are capped and limited. There are long waitlists that only exist in the developmental disabilities system, and services are often inefficient and ineffective in contributing to people’s health, safety, and quality of life.
These systems, however, are essential to people’s very survival – so creating change is a risky business, and the question that comes up is how do we continue to shore up the existing system while trying to create the new one. This can be done as long as people with IDD are considered the experts and co-creators of the systems that support them.
This spring, Boulder County commissioned a needs assessment to listen to and learn from the people of Boulder County who have IDD. This is a giant leap for our community because we will finally hear the voices of people who have been silenced for so long. It is exciting to feel our community moving toward a greater understanding of the hopes and needs of people with IDD, and toward claiming the many lost opportunities as we begin to include their voices in our community.
