Meet the Disability Cultural Center Leadership Committee!

Anna Goose — Tue, 18 Sep 2018 22:20:10 +0000

San Francisco's Department of Aging and Adult Services has hired the Longmore Institute to create a new disability cultural center that will provide San Franciscans with an accessible space to socialize, build community, educate, and express and foster disability culture. Meet the team of experts who will guide this project!:

Alice Wong

Founder/ Director - Disability Visibility Project

Alice is a media maker, research consultant, and disability activist based in San Francisco, CA. She is the Founder of the Disability Visibility Project™ (DVP), a community partnership with StoryCorps and an online community dedicated to creating, amplifying, and sharing disability media and culture.

Bruce Wolfe

Chief Information Officer - Alcohol Justice / SF Community Hand Trust / Haight Ashbury Neighborhood Council

Bruce is a professional audio engineer, stage manager and T'ai Chi instructor. Bruce holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work with a concentration in Social Development from San Francisco State University and is a Life Coach.

Elizabeth Grigsby

Community Advocate - Golden Gate Regional Center

Elizabeth works for Golden Gate Regional Center since 1995 as the Consumer Rights Advocate. Her philosophy towards self-advocacy is to help individuals with disabilities thrive and get the best services possible that they deserve.

Fiona Hinze

Systems Change Coordinator/Community Organizer - ILRC-SF

Fiona works to ensure consumers are aware of advocacy opportunities in the community, such as calls to action on various issues. She serves on the State Independent Living Council and is a member of the Disability Organizing Network.

Jessica Lehman

Executive Director - Senior & Disability Action

Jessica supports domestic worker rights as a founding member and leader of Hand in Hand: the Domestic Employers Association. She leads monthly Organizer’s Forum calls, as part of the National Disability Leadership Alliance, to share ideas and experiences related to organizing the disability community.

Lisamaria Martinez

Director of Community Services - LightHouse for the Blind

Lisamaria has always been an advocate for the blind, she studied social welfare at U.C. Berkeley, and began volunteering at the LightHouse. She worked at the Hatlen Center for the Blind as a living skills and braille instructor. She has Masters from Louisiana Tech in Psychology program with an emphasis in Orientation & Mobility. Lisamaria is now Director of Community Services at LightHouse.

Marti Goddard

Director of Access Services - San Francisco Public Library

Marti has focused much of her work toward ensuring universal access for library users with disabilities to all of the Library's collections and programs of service. She is most active in ASCLA, the Association of Specialized and Cooperative Library Agencies, where she currently is chair of the Universal Access Interest Group and the ALA Diversity Council. Marti served as editor of "Guidelines for Library and Information Services for the American Deaf Community" and is coordinating efforts for a revised edition of those guidelines.

Nicole Bohn

Director - SF Mayor's Office on Disability

Nicole began her professional career in 1997 providing crisis intervention and reasonable accommodation counseling services for individuals with disabilities. She worked at the University of San Francisco from 1997 to 2008, during which time she was progressively responsible for managing and overseeing the University’s reasonable accommodation program and policies. Most recently, Nicole served as the Director of the Disability Programs and Resource Center at San Francisco State University, leading and coordinating centralized compliance efforts for a campus with more than 30,000 students and 3,800 employees during the last eight years.

Orkid Sassouni

Employee at SFPL - Deaf Services

Orkid received her B.A degree in Art History and Museum Studies from Gallaudet University. Orkid attended Parsons School of Design in New York City from which she received a B.F.A degree. She attended San Francisco State University to study Inter Art Center. She received her M.A degree in Interdisciplinary Arts: Concentration in Education in 2002, a rare major that allowed Orkid to study multi-disciplines in theory, education, research, and discussion. She currently works at the San Francisco Public Library’s Deaf Services Center. She is also a past President and Coordinator for Deaf Visual and Performing Artists, known as DVPA. But Orkid has never abandoned her love of photography. Her photographs and mixed media artworks have been shown in galleries across the United States.

Tiffany Yu

CEO/Founder - DiversAbility

Tiffany graduated with honors from Georgetown University and currently live in San Francisco. She is a speaker, social impact entrepreneur, diversity & inclusion community builder, and inclusion and empowerment advocate. She is the CEO & Founder of Diversability (rebranding disability through community) and the Founder of the Awesome Foundation Disability Chapter. She has been named one of the "100 most influential Asian Americans of 2017," one of "100 visionary leaders," and a "women of influence" honoree.

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disability cultural center

leadership committee

Alice Wong

Bruce Wolfe

An Accidental Advocate: Tiffany Yu and Diversability

Visitor — Thu, 27 Jul 2017 19:31:26 +0000

By: Asa Arnold, Students for Access Intern

During her senior year at college, Tiffany Yu and her fellow Resident Assistants were asked to do a diversity exercise where they took slices of “pie” to signify the importance of their identities; for Tiffany, this included being American, disabled, and Asian. Her disability made up a significant portion of her pie. However, when she looked at the pie of the person next to her, she saw that being able-bodied made up only the tiniest sliver. As she recalls, “The fact that I can’t use one of my arms is something I think about every single day…so when I saw his pie it was such an ‘aha moment’ for me that wow, if you don’t have a disability, you don’t think about it.”

This aha moment and lack of disability peer groups at Georgetown led Tiffany to start Diversability as a student club. Many years later, well after she was active in campus efforts, people continued to contact her about it. These emails revealed that there was a need for a peer-to-peer organization like Diversability on a wider level. So in 2015, Tiffany launched Diversability as a company, “to do more with the young professional network to facilitate an ongoing conversation” and “look at social context around disability.” Diversability is an events platform that aims to "connect, showcase, and empower people of all abilities doing amazing things," and is now in six cities across the country. When she was nine years old, Tiffany was in a car accident and the nerves in her right arm became so damaged that she lost the full use of it. In that same accident, she lost her father. Tiffany’s disability was “a painful reminder of what had happened,” and for a decade, if someone asked her about it, she recalls, “I’d just start crying.” However, founding and participating in Diversability in college not only became what she was most proud of, but it also allowed her to become more comfortable with her disability. She even started speaking about it and now widely shares her story.

https://vimeo.com/189032511

The silence that surrounds disability, and particularly in the workplace, is one of the main things Tiffany strives to change. She names unemployment as the number one issue for people with disabilities. “A lot of times the way employers see hiring people with disabilities [is] as a social good, or as something they have to do to meet some kind of quota.” Although some companies have tried incentive programs to hire more people with disabilities, Tiffany calls attention to some of the pitfalls of these programs. Often when an employee is hired through an incentive program, they feel like a pity hire. But if there is no support program, then the position ends up harming, rather than helping, the employee.

While working in tech, Tiffany saw a lack of conversation, community, and representation around disability. She also came across the assumption in tech that people with disabilities must have jobs that focus on disability, which she works to disprove. Because of this, much of Tiffany’s work is about disability community building in the workplace. When people with disabilities are hired and do rise in the ranks of a company, they need to do more to help those who come after them, Tiffany says. “When you’re at a space you feel you belong, you feel empowered” to be a part of a company’s success. But “when you’re on an island, it’s hard to succeed.” A sense of belonging, as Tiffany says, is one of the most important aspects of success, especially in a field as competitive as tech.

This post is part of a series developed by Students for Access, which aims to be a part of the effort to make more people feel they belong in the field by increasing the visibility of people with disabilities working in the industry. For more stimulating conversations, check out our other featured profiles of disabled people working and thriving in tech, coming to the blog in the coming weeks! Additionally, on Tuesday, August 22nd, from 2-3:30 pm PST, Students for Access will be hosting a free webinar “Beyond Diversity 101: Learning from the Perspectives of People with Disabilities in Tech.” To join us, please RSVP. Captioning will be provided.

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disability

Diversability

People with Disabilities in Tech

technology

Tiffany Yu