STL Advocate

09/04/2025

Great event. Highly recommended.

FestAbility is hosting our 6th Disability Pride festival at the Missouri History Museum in St Louis on Saturday, October 4th.
If you would like to sponsor the event, join the walk or request a resource table, click on this link, https://forms.gle/gzryaiQ1FFCw2SCa7

08/15/2025

Happy back to school time.
If your kids are reading below grade level or struggling to learn to read, here is a webinar you need to attend. Continue the content learning even if the reading is a struggle.

Especially for middle school and high school! Simple accomodation for any IEP or 504 plan. Let them learn the curriculum (social studies, science, electives) even if they can't independently read it themselves.

Listening with text-to-speech: Tools to support reading access. The Pacer Center is a leading resource for all thing IEP.

This workshop will introduce a variety of text-to-speech tools that enable users to listen to written content. Participants will see demonstrations of reading pens, mobile apps, and computer-based tools compatible with Chrome and Microsoft platforms. These technologies can benefit individuals of all...

07/05/2025

Continue, commit, and endure. For there is no other choice. Let all your elected officials know who you are and that Medicaid cuts affect your family. And ALL families.

We will continue to fight for Medicaid & for medically complex children and their families!

The Republican majority's reconciliation vehicle that will cut nearly one trillion dollars from Medicaid, undermine Affordable Care Act subsidies affecting 24 million Americans, rip coverage away from more than 13.7 million adults and children, and threaten the fundamental right for people to live in their communities with their families.

The following statement is attributable to co-founder and Executive Director Elena Hung:

07/02/2025

Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your neighbors. The only thing more powerful to a politician than special interest money is voters speaking up.

06/26/2025

It's not!!

Let’s be clear about something.

A van ride is not a day out.

Not for you.
Not for me.
Not for anyone.

If someone packed you into a van, drove around for a bit, maybe looped the same streets, then brought you back and called it a "day out," you'd call that insulting. You’d ask: “Where did we go? What did we do?”

And you’d be right to ask.

But too often, people with intellectual and developmental disabilities don’t get asked. They get loaded in and loaded out, and that’s supposed to be enough. It’s supposed to be stimulating, enriching, maybe even a treat. But really? It’s just movement without meaning.

A van ride isn't a choice. It isn’t a memory made. It’s transportation, and when there’s no destination, it’s just time being filled. That’s not inclusion. That’s killing time.

And people know. People know when they’re being patronized. They know when something’s being done to them instead of with them. They know when they’re being managed instead of respected.

We have to stop pretending that busy is the same as belonging.
We have to stop calling it a day out when it’s really just a loop around the block in a world that keeps them outside of it.

If we truly believe in rights, in dignity, in inclusion then we need to start asking different questions.

Not “Did they get out today?” but:
“Did they choose where to go?”
“Did they feel welcomed there?”
“Did they laugh, learn, live something?”

Because people with intellectual and developmental disabilities deserve more than motion.

They deserve meaning.
..

ID: Fionn holds a cardboard sign above his read which reads "A van ride is not a day out."

06/25/2025

This affects my family, your family, and all Americans. Red and Blue. Wake up people. Make the call to your elected leaders today. If not for me, for US.

34 Medicaid protesters were arrested, many of them people with disabilities, some in wheelchairs, after staging a sit-in to demand Congress stop gutting Medicaid. Link in comments.

Here’s why this matters to Missouri: Lawmakers are pushing plans that do not directly cut your benefits on paper, but they do cut the funding that pays for the administrative staff who help people stay enrolled. At the same time, they are adding more red tape, more paperwork, and stricter reporting rules.

The result? People lose coverage. Not because they do not qualify, but because they cannot jump through the hoops fast enough.

This is not just bad policy. It is intentional. It is how you quietly rip healthcare away from people without ever passing a bill that says so.

Missouri has already dropped 400,000 people from Medicaid since 2022. If Congress moves forward with capping Medicaid funding and slashing support systems, that number will grow.

Silence is not neutral. It is permission.

Call your representatives. Show up. Speak out. Because they are counting on you to look away.

04/20/2025

There's a camaraderie between families who share similar experiences. We might not live near each other, we might not be able to have play dates with our kids, but when the chips are down we're out here pushing for our childrens' right to exist fully and safely in this world.

Right now this is more important than ever. I live in Canada and understand that our cultural landscape is intertwined with our southern neighbours. This post is for everyone, but particularly addressed to the rhetoric that is currently taking place regarding timelines and autism causality.

When I worked in the disability support sector, many of the people I cared for were disabled adults in their late 40's to early 60's. I cared for a man who had hepatitis since childhood because the institution he was left at by his family reused needles on disabled people. I cared for a nonspeaking autistic man who hadn't seen his family since he was left at an institution as a 5 year old. He understood everything, but even in the mid 2010's, this was not recognised. Almost everyone I cared for bore scars of institutional mistreatment, whether physical or mental.

If you are an abled person who was born between the 50's and 70's, you're absolutely right that you didn't see disabled people growing up. Doctors, social workers, and schools encouraged the institutionalisation of disabled children. Many disabled children were left at institutions and never saw regular family life, or even their families, again. This is what was considered normal during the institutional period of disability history. This was a period in the recent history of science and medicine in which someone's humanity was assumed to be present (or not) based on their proximity to a norm that our work still questions. Depending on where you live, the deinstitutionalisation of disabled people didn't happen until the 70's, and for some, even later.

A parent I know, whose child is much like mine, shared the following image to cast light on this history. This picture was taken in 1982. I can't imagine the fear and pain children felt to be kept in these conditions. I can't imagine the attitudes of the adults around them that led to their confinement. This is not ancient history.

When someone says there 'wasn't all this autism back in their day', think of this picture. Think of the many thousands of people whose lives were lived in squalid conditions and under state-sanctioned institutional neglect and mistreatment, and shut them down. Disabled people are often still overlooked and neglected in human rights movements. We neglect disability rights at our own collective peril, anyone can experience disability within their lifetimes, but beyond this truth, it is our collective duty.

This can never be a reality for children like mine, ever again.

02/16/2025

For those that are wondering. A good read.

If Donald Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Education, Linda McMahon, is is confirmed by the Senate, her odd task will be to take charge of an agency in order to euthanize it. “I told Linda, ‘Linda, I hope you do a great job and put yourself out of a job,’ ” Trump said. His Administration wants to abolish the Department of Education—which would require an act of Congress—or at least to shrink its remit, which encompasses the federal student-loan program, Title I funding for low-income districts, special-education services for students with disabilities, civil-rights complaints, and more. This demolition work is already well under way, courtesy of Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn DOGE squad.

“Gutting the agency would deliver a terrible blow to public schools, particularly in rural areas and in high-density, low-income urban districts, which receive larger shares of their funding from the federal government. Advocates also fear that dismantling the Department of Education would have an immediate and tangible impact on students with disabilities,” Jessica Winter writes. Read about the future of the D.O.E. under Trump—one that will likely hinge on "the world views of two billionaires who abhor what they perceive as weakness and waste”: https://newyorkermag.visitlink.me/Isq91K

02/13/2025

Please familiarize yourself with this topic!!

02/08/2025

This!!! Pay attention folks.

Congress wants to cut $2.3 trillion from Medicaid, but rushed, reckless spending cuts like this will have serious consequences. Children, seniors in long-term care, and people with disabilities WILL lose access the to care they count on. Stay tuned for how to help.

02/08/2025

Radical is a new film from Apple Studios and the Academy Award winning writer/director of CODA, Siân Heder. It tells the story of disability activist Judy Heumann leading over a hundred disabled people to take over the San Francisco Federal Building in 1977, kicking off a 28 day sit-in. They quickly form a tightly bound community, refusing to leave until the government enforces section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, requiring all federal spaces to become accessible.

The Telsey Office is holding an open virtual casting call for the “504 Protesters with Disabilities” and are specifically looking for black men that are wheelchair users to portray the below characters:

BRAD LOMAX
Character portrayed as male, Black, 20s to 30s, wheelchair user. A Black Panther who thinks outside the box to support his fellow protesters.

DON
Character portrayed as male, Black, 20s to 30s, gay, wheelchair or mobility aid user. A respected civil rights activist who understands the intersectionality between his Black, religious, q***r and disabled communities

To learn more visit: https://castittalent.com/Radical

If you have any questions or need accommodations to make the casting website accessible, email radicalmoviecasting@thetelseyoffice.com

06/25/2024

Advocacy for those who cannot speak up for themselves is the most important. Thanks you USDOJ for stepping in when our elected leaders and bureaucrats are looking the other way.

The Justice Department announced today its findings that the State of Missouri violated Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by unnecessari...