and your senses are tingling and is awaiting a, this doesn't feel right, trust and whose instinct. turned around and take a look at what is out there that's making you feel that way? chances are if you're having those feelings of anxiety, something is wrong. pay attention to your surroundings and yet to be of people around you. a lot of times we're focused on what we are doing on their cell phones or newspapers, your court briefs in things like that that was track of what's going on around us. we don't know we are and we don't know what the people are doing around is the we've got to try to always look around and see what's happening so window, make a plan so we can react to what's going on. practice daily. practice daily means continue to develop your situational awareness to walk into an area, doesn't take long, walk into an area, that's an exit, there is an exit. i'm walking through the mall, can they get throughout

footlocker in case there's an active shooter? where am i going to go? if i'm in a restaurant where are the exits? can i go out to the kitchen? in the area ahead of you, behind you, all around you. get a sense of what's happening and what people are doing. a lot of times when the soldiers in combat were going to an area and they notice all of a sudden there's nobody on the street, there were people there a little while ago, where is everybody? not a new something was getting ready to happen. it looks out of place, scan the area. continue to develop your action plan. if you're thinking what if, what it is a great question. what am i going to do if something happened over here? develop your plan. am i going back this way, or am i going up the other accept? that's a broad overview of the active shooter response plan.

who has a question concerning active shooter? if you have questions or concerns what i hope to do is develop a guide for security self-assessment for you or for your office. i'm going to try to put that on the website that's available to the members of the conference. i put some sign up sheets in the back if you want to put your name and e-mail address, i'll be glad to develop that incident you by e-mail the thank you very much for your kind attention. [applause] >> folks, if you could just give me a second i'm trying to find a panel for the next segment are

we will get started in just a second. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> tonight on "the communicators" we visit voice of america and spoke with john lansing, ceo of its parent corporation. >> its evolving from a world where we're sending a signal to lots of people that originates in one place to where we're getting to a place with a platform we provide a logic to talk to one another and have great impact in their part of the world. >> that voa charter, and as far as i know it has always been the governing rule of law of this organization, is that we will tell the truth. good news, ma bad news, we will be fair, honest, credible. >> it has not changed in regard, the reason we're there. all of that doesn't change. when you have a region where

there's no freedom of speech or the access to information, and that hasn't changed at all since we started relations. relations. >> watch tonight at eight eastern on c-span2. >> we are live this morning for the start of a day long conference with advocates for the disabled talking about candidates for public office and how they can engage and reach out to voters with disabilities. session will focus on disability messaging for the 2016 national election to ensure events and camping the truth are accessible to all. this is live coverage on c-span2. >> i am delighted to welcome everybody here to this panel discussion, or series of panel discussions that is by and for people with disabilities across america. my name is jennifer laszlo mizrahi. i myself am an individual with a disability and i know what it

means to. an amazing job with multiple disabilities. i believe deeply like everyone here does that people with disabilities deserves to be able to achieve the american dream just like anyone else. i also believe that the only way for that to happen is for those of us who either have disabilities or who have loved ones with disabilities to take political action in our own hands to really create our own better destiny and own better future. i am here on half of respectability. we are a new nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based here in the washington, d.c. area that is working on the front lines advancing opportunities for people with disabilities. we have a number of speakers from both sides of the aisle, both democrats and republicans. we have close captioning and

also have american sign language, and i really appreciate them at our day-to-day is fully accessible. additionally, if you're following us on c-span or if you want to have copies of the presentation, they are available on our website to our website is www.respectability u.s.a..org. all of our powerpoint are also screen reader accessible for people who are vision impaired. i want to thank our sponsors and helping make it possible because we are providing this as a free public service for people in the public. and so i'm really appreciative of their efforts. i also want to thank our amazing staff. really, we have a terrific team, and they had a 15 our young leaders.

we have a national fellowship program that is young people with and without disabilities who want to enable a better future for the 56 million americans with disabilities, and they work together with you skills building, advocacy, writing. they create our publication, the respectability report, and they're really on the front lines. we feel like we work for them. we have a tremendous cohort of young fellows. i want to thank brian it was our director, who is you also want to let all the fellows know how much we appreciate you and to let anyone who is watching know that we are looking for new fellows for the fall coalport and for the spring cohort, it is a wonderful spells chip -- osha program for people who want to come to washington, gamesome skills and content and fully go into careers in public policies,

advocacy and media. and some hoping that my powerpoint is working and it does appear that that isn't the case. i'm just going to start by saying again that respectability is a nonprofit organization, and all the materials for this program are on our website which again is www.respectabilityusa.org. one in five americans has a disability. one in five. that's 56 million americans. additionally, a lot of people don't understand what disabilities are. so yes, disabilities can be that somebody use a wheelchair. that is a kind of disability as his blindness or being deaf, but so is autism, psoas muscle health. the majority of americans who have a disability, it is a nonvisible disability. is a very good important to

understand that all of us are facing state this, barriers, obstacles that is keeping us from achieving what we want to achieve which are jobs, employment, apartment and a better future and, of course, to achieve that it's very important to be deeply involved in the political process. on our board of respectability we are very proud to be completely nonpartisan or bipartisan, and we board members from both sides of the aisle. all of them are committed by want to just highlight that congressman steve bartlett and congressman tony coelho, one republican, when a democrat, offered the americans with disabilities act in the u.s. congress 26 years ago, and have never stopped being true champions of people with disabilities. the ada was passed 26 years ago. we still have so much yet to accomplish and that's why i'm so pleased that you are all here

with us today. 51% of american voters report that they have a loved one with a disability or they themselves have a disability. disability is a very large minority group but it's also the only minority that you can join at anytime to get accident, illness or aging. so if you don't have a disability now, you might want to think of yourself as temporarily abled. because you never know what could happen in the future. we are all in this together, and it does impact the majority of voters. i want to also say that the rt things that happen to people with disabilities that we need to pay attention to. one of them is the sexual abuse of people with disabilities that starts at a high rate with children with disability i know this personally as a person with a disability who could not read or write until i was much older than most children and i have very low self-esteem, and i

trust a summit at school who i should not have trusted. when i was only in the sixth grade i was raped. unfortunately, that is very common for people with disabilities, children and adults alike. but it's not something that you discuss in the political agenda and it is one of many, many reasons that we need to have political power. the second reason that we need political power is that individuals with disabilities are not graduating high school at the rate they need to and, indeed, only six to 1% of americans with disabilities graduate high school. so it's very important to address that because high school obtain is very critical to job acting that and very closely linked to whether or not somebody enters frankly the school to prison pipeline. every single your 300,000 young americans with disabilities exit the school system. some with proud degrees, others

after being suspended wrongfully because people didn't understand their disability or those people need transitions to get into the workforce so they can have jobs and opportunities just like anyone else. only one out of every three americans who has a disability was working age has a job to that's a pool of 22 million people, the vast majority of whom according to polls do want to be gainfully employed. and by the way, we are encouraging competitive, integrated employment. real jobs at real wages. poverty is extreme for people with disabilities. and, in fact, i know a lot of people think poverty, they think of racial dynamics, african-americans, hispanics, women. if you look at the census data, tragically people with disabilities are the poor of the

poor, poorest of the poor, poor than african-americans, hispanics and women. and if your multiple marginalized because you are african-american and java disability or your hispanic edge of a disability or an immigrant and you have a disability it is even more challenging. so there is a real problem in america and it is a massive and growing gap in the labor force participation rate between people with and without disability. this is something that we believe should be very much discussed in the political war of ideas. currently 11 million americans with working age with disabilities are living exclusively on government benefits. and the majority of them would prefer to have gainful employment. our organization is the active in writing op-ed's around the country around this time to raise awareness. if you look at the powerpoint is a link to op-ed's we have

published in more than 30 states at this point in time. this is one of the things that young leaders do when they come to washington and work with us as fellow. it's that we work with people on friday and placing op-ed's and dating violence and getting published. we are very proud of the fact we are very data-driven, always looking for better performance better metrics. one of the reasons for that is because if we don't address these issues, people with disabilities frequently have one of two outcomes. either they are living at home on their parents couch and tell their parents die, in which case they're living on her brother's couch and living on government benefits. 11 million working age americans are currently living on government benefits. or in many cases tragically it entered the school to prison pipeline, and there are currently 750,000 americans with

disabilities who are incarcerated. 750,000. so we are talking about 150,000 people who are deaf or hearing impaired, 150,000 who are blind or vision impaired, and fully half a million who have cognitive impairment. is a very significant concerns that we have not seen fully addressed in the political environment and that's why we're having this training today, because we really need for people like you to move these issues forward. i just want to highlight that we have a tremendous publication on this issue. philip pauli, lord appelbaum, myself along with others just published this on the issues of people with disabilities who are incarcerated your we are also very interested in enabling their to be better vision of people with disabilities, and so we are very proud of our board member, jonathan murray, who is literally the inventor of

reality television. he did real world on mtv and the kardashians and i am kate and other shows. we're delighted and honored that we are able to work with him on any tv show called born this way. born this way stars acas of some individuals with down syndrome of young adults who are working to get into workplace, independent housing and they are just tremendous people and it's very important that what we see on television have high expectation for people with disabilities because high expectation for rt. indeed, study session with programs like project research and programs like bridges to work that fully 70% of individuals with his abilities can have terrific jobs. so we are really working towards that with our team. then i'm going to turn it over to my coworkers, and i just want, you can read their bios in the program. you can see their bios on our

website, www.respectability u.s.a..org. but i just want to say personally from my heart a few things about these two individuals. the first of them is lord appelbaum who i've had the pleasure of working with in this capacity and others over many years. she is one of the brightest women in america and she is one of the hardest working people i've ever seen. and i encourage every single one of you to go to our website that has our publications, the respectability report, where she and her team have published hundreds of articles about the intersection of the presidential campaign and disabilities. it has over 100,000 clicks already. she went to journalism school. she worked at nbc news with chuck todd and andrew mitchell, and she's absolutely extraordinary. it is an honor to work with her at our other colleagues who is about to speak, philip pauli, he is unbelievable. he is so smart it just

completely puts me to shame, just to put in context, when he was eight, the tv show did an entire tv special about philip pauli, the smartest eight year old on earth. and if you google him, at age eight, he was the most impressive young person that you could ever see, but to work with them in our office side by side as he worked on the testimony that we are submitting and we've now submitted testimony in 100% of the states in america, to work with him on analyzing data to ensure best practices is pure joy. i think most of these individuals are a true gift to the 56 million americans who have a disability. so i encourage you to join with us in these efforts. because none of the work that we are doing can succeed without you. without further ado let me turn it over to philip pauli.

[applause] >> good morning. as jennifer said, my name is philip pauli that we will not issuing a clip from unsolved mysteries today. but it is on youtube. what i do want to talk about our friends, neighbors, loved ones, family members. as jennifer said, they are are one in five americans have disabilities and that means there are over 56 million americans with one type of disability or another. to put it in a different context, that means there are 40 million voting age peop with disabilities, and as we are going to be talking about today, those votes can swing elections. they can swing competitive house and senate races. they can turn the outcome of the presidential election. we will talk why that matters, how you can get more involved, and we will be talking at what you need to know how we can work together.

so as jennifer said, respectability exists to be a voice in the political arena. there are many voices to get in a disability community of we all have our place and our part to play. so want to take you back four years ago to the last presidential election cycle before respectability existed. as jennifer was looking at the challenges facing the disability community she partnered with several polling firms to conduct a poll of voters in the presidential election looking at the lens of disability which many pollsters never really considered before. we looked at it and we found that the maturity of likely voters at least knew someone with a disability. we found that there could be significant response to candidates who expose we talked about disability issues and we found democrats, we were sometimes more likely to talk about these issues directly.

as we said we found 51% of likely voters know someone with a disability or are a person with a disability themselves. building off of that respectability was found in 2013 with a mission to change attitudes in society, to bust statements after will empower people with disabilities to pursue the american dream. critical to that is economic involved and political involvement. we were founded in 2013 and employ 14 before the midterm elections we conducted another poll of likely voters in competitive districts, swing states, places like wisconsin, ohio and so when. we found a slightly higher percentage of people likely voters knew someone with a disability or were a member of the disability community themselves. one of the pollsters would work with was dan greenberg what he said was this committee as far bigger than people realize. as we said the disability index more than half of the electorate. you see the breakdown in terms

of people who identify as not knowing if they have about the conference with a disability and those who do. one of the interesting findings is that the likely voters we polled come it broke down in terms of partisanship right along the american spectrum. you saw a solid core group of republicans, a solid core group of democrats with disabilities. most important of all into this with disabilities. the percentages as you can see really match up with artisanship as people identify voters without disabilities. and so after the midterm election and the dust settled from the shellacking, we looked at where, what motivated the voters, but i've been interested, how did they decide on which candidates? swing voters in those key senate and governor races found they were much more likely to vote for candidates who made it a top priority of enabling citizens

with this bill is going to implement. the percentages were very solid, breaking down right down the middle in terms of republicans, democrats and independents. unemployment was a critical issue. particularly for independent voters, independent women and non-college educated voters. i encourage you to go to our website we have full methodology, full question or you can look out. one of the interesting things is that midterm elections tend to be fairly quiet. not a lot of people out there other than hard-core political geeks get out the on and off you and vote. we found voters with disabilities and voters would love those with disabilities were very energized and excited to get out their in a crucial election to avoid people would have ignored. we also did compare and contrast between voters with and without disabilities. we found that people with disabilities were very concerned about the economy to a greater percentage than other voters.

as you can see we have a breakdown in terms of what votes come what issues people most care about and the overriding issue in the voters from the disability community we looked at was the economy. we credit that very much to the gap in labor force participation rates. as we said curtly only one in three americans with a disability is employed. there's progress being made taken at the state level but significant challenges remain. if you look at it in the long term, even as african-americans and hispanics and women have been entering the workforce in greater and greater numbers, people with disabilities are falling behind. however, the evidence we found, studies we've done, the polls were conducted am talking with people in washington, d.c. and back home in home districts, this matters and that this can win elections the as sam said, the issue can affect outcomes in very competitive races.

we have a competitive race, candidates are looking for voters, picking up votes here and there so they can find the goal to win the we work with republican pollster who said we are accounted think about soccer moms comp this annex but this poll shows americans with disabilities and those who care deeply about them our demographic we need to be attention to in the future. now, 2016, prime time. i'm going to turn it over to lauren appelbaum will talk about our outreach to the presidential candidates. lauren, take it away. spiffed think you're going. i know it's an early morning -- thank everyone. with another network is a we appreciate everyone who made it here. so like philip said, he brought up what brought us to why are we

paying attention to this issue in the 2016 cycle. what we decided to do is we sent our young fellows to iowa and new hampshire would be spent nearly two months attempting town halls and other meetings with all of the candidates come off 22 presidential candidates that were in the race at the time from the major parties, received visits of our fellows who went and sat in the town halls and asked them critical questions on issues of employment for people with disabilities and other issues relating to what people with disabilities are wanting to hear from there elected officials. so you will see, there are some pictures and i will describe the pictures that are up on the screen. you have our democracy associate justin any during bernie sanders at the next picture yet to of our fellows taking a selfie with hillary clinton. the next one with ted cruz. the next one with marco rubio

and ann campbell you have a selfie with donald trump pic pictures with john kasich and with jeb bush. we found it extremely important to be reaching out on both sides of the aisle. it is disability rights is not a partisan issue and it should not be a partisan issue, so we are very careful to reach out. even when it became clear who the nominees might be, we still reached out to all the presidential candidates because just because someone is no longer running for president doesn't mean they're not still could have an influential position in government, immediate and elsewhere who can make a decision that would impact our issues. a few things that we did other than attending panels is we held briefings. one of these pictures you will see a picture of representative from the sanders, bush, clinton, amount and santorum campaign all sitting down together where they came to listen to a briefing

like this. that only those of us on the d.c. but we invited disability organizations who were local to new hampshire, to iowa, to nevada for them to talk about what is important to them. we found hazard once said, politics is local. we found issues that we saw the national stage, sometimes in some of the issues on the local stage that we need to be paying attention to the our partners in these individual states were able to award us. an example of the impact of our work. we have met with the hillary clinton campaign a dozen times or so and so then we got a call from a woman in the iowa office saying hey, did you know that hillary is going to be doing in autism plan? is was last winter. we said this is wonderful. how can we be involved? how can we make sure that the right people are here getting

information? and so we were able to provide information like with offer to every single other campaign about why it's important to not only reach out to people who have autism but of all disabilities, and of different issues and specifically employment issues. that is one kind of up, from you again and again. we are not the only disability organization that has met with the campaigns, and it is a wide coalition that we are very thankful to be part of. another issue is that we found out from our partners in iowa how lots of the caucus locations themselves were physically not accessible. mib in houses or elsewhere. so we brought it up with individuals from different campaigns who were then able to take it to the next level. while it was a 100% for this cycle, we have noticed that it is working, then you is moving in the correct direction. hopefully by next election

people when i think of holding a caucus site and the house i cannot accessible for someone in a wheelchair or a caucus site without and interpreter for someone who may need one. another example some of you may have seen is priorities the u.s.a. which is a pro-clinton super pac. they have run two ads featuring young individuals with disabilities focused on trust. specifically attacking trump for supposedly making fun of a journalist with a disability. and so why is this significant? because you don't see in 2012 or prior campaigns or cyberattacks doing ads on disability issues. and so if we are releasing a shift to initiate continues in both party platforms. the dnc party platform you have 35 mentions of disability which

is way more, more than double that in previous cycles. and the rnc party platform, they really talked about the importance of advancing americans with the supposed, the ada, the americans with disabilities act, employment for people with disabilities and the issue of sub minimum wage of 10 people with disabilities a proper wage. using this across the aisle on both sides, both parties really pushing these issues. one project that we did was a question at the we sent the questioner to every single presidential candidate. it was an in depth questionnaire, 16 questions on a variety of employment issues from health care to education to accessibility to housing to stigma. we have several candidates on both sides of the aisle return their responses, including hillary clinton bernie sanders on the democratic side, and jeb

bush, ben carson, as christie and john kasich on the republican side. we are still waiting for answers from donald trump and will continue to ask him up until election day spent there are 91 days left until election day. so there's plenty of time to get the questioner. >> you are absolutely right. folks like rev up new jersey have been kind of going. they have knocked on the door of headquarters. they felt they trump called a big the opportunities for people to engage candidates on both sides of the aisle. if you get them to answer these questions. one thing we did with these is we took that animate individual state voter guides where we use philip and his team's work with testimony from each of the states and sent them to mediate in each of the states. because people are not come before the cycle people are not paying attention to these issues

and they wanted to help make that happen. so like i said the agency an individual list that we have different press organizations say hey, this is interesting, we have never covered this before. so wisconsin in particular has been very interested in disabilitdisabilit y issues and they've kind of been asking us for comment, every time somebody comes up in a completely nonpartisan way, which has been really great. i mention there's a way for everyone in this room to get involved. we have taken this presidential vote questionnaire. we are looking at competitive, open and competitive senate and gubernatorial candidates in several different states which are up on a powerpoint which is also payable on our website and in a handout. everyone here receive a handout

that links the candidates running in the states, the e-mail addresses and their twitter handles. we found it very effective when individuals, not just us as an organization, but people reject the candidates especially if you happen to be from the state or yet member chapters in those states who can then contact the folks running for senate and governor in your state and say hey, respected osha questioner. we would love for you to fill it up because we want to know where you stand on disability issues. both parties have a place where they can start from. their party platforms which talk what does the issues so they can take information from there to answer the questions to make life a little easier as well as look at the examples of a presidential candidate that i felt there out. jennifer mention the respected the report. i hope you all check it out, www.the respectability report.org.

we do our best to cover every single issue of the intersection of disability and the 2016 election. presidential and down ballot. so if you hear something, if you see something, if you attend a town hall, later this afternoon several of our current and former phils are going to be talking about their experience in iowa and new hampshire and let me know how you can do that yourself back on a state level who can really make a difference. because we found extending these events, attending the town halls and asking the questions, that is what candidates started talking about these issues and then press started in interest in covering these issues. you have that on one hand, and the other hand, i kept all summer, that's okay. you can get on social media. so there's all these different

ways that it would can get involved. i mentioned it was the other disability groups that are really doing amazing work that we cannot forget. two of them include a pd, rev up movement as well as the vote bot which was tarred by three individuals with disabilities. web up has been doing a lot of work at a state level and the national level. if you're familiar with either of their work, i suggest you check it out. crip the vote. if you're tweeting can we ask that use the hashtag pwdsvote. we would love for you to be live tweeting and folks at home, we are checking that hashtag analyze tweeting. you can submit a question that way as well.

there are several articles about this work that i would love for you to be aware of it as many of you heard, speaking at the dnc, a lot of news covered her speech and being the turning point for disability issues being presented in a positive light at the convention. there are several other articles out there from cnn to fox to the "washington post" and elsewhere that are really highlighting how the importance of this movement. i want to turn his back over to fill affordable who's going to talk about some other issues of inaccessibility in the voting world. >> thank you, lauren. so as i said we are 91 days away from the election and when it comes to that cold november day with america will get out to the

polls, far to meet people with disabilities will face significant barriers, barriers that might will rob them of their political voice, rob them of the political power. in 2012 only 27% of polling places were found to be accessible. that's less than one in three. there's a variety of reasons for that. however, it is a significant issue and it's an issue we need to talk about now and then we need to deal with. what does inaccessibility meant in terms of a polling place? one significant issue we see in the primary season and continue to see during the general election is the fact that camping event oftentimes occur in non-ada accessible location. sometimes fundraisers will be hosted in private residences which are not bound by the restrictions and rules of the ada. sometimes and far too often websites, television ads, social media are not accessible because they don't have captions.

one issue we continue to see is that candidate websites are not fully accessible, meaning somebody who is blind or visually impaired can go to a website, campaign website and can't read the putt for because the website isn't optimized to allow them to use their screen reader software. a significant issue we see is time and time again is captioning. we will talk in more detail on that about how campaigns, candidates and people utilized social media can improve their accessibility whether it's on the website or by adding captions to be just to it's surprisingly easy. also a lack of asl interpreters and defense, oftentimes events registration will not have the option to request an accommodation that can create serious access issue. then there's this difficult thing to think when it comes to physical barriers to voting and access. lack of france, lack of parking a lack of elevators, lack of real balance. new hampshire in particular because of discipline rights in

new hampshire has been doing a lot to improve the accessibility voting booths and ballot boxes. so this exciting work being done. however, in excess of the remains a serious problem and we will talk about it more later this afternoon. we've got quite a bit of time before november and i think that in this time we need to be working as a community about these issues. one of the links in our powerpoint is a link to the social media contact list for state and local election officials. those of you who are at home watching this, i encourage you to go to that link and find the contact information of her local election officials and ask them what he doing to great excess of voting options? what are you doing to encourage early voting? what are you doing around voter registration? as we said become socially to be an incredibly powerful tool and people always ask us what we do, how can we empower? start by getting out there and

tweeting. start by posting on facebook. and look at what information is available from your local election official. it's important. i know as a resident of arlington, virginia, when i go to the voter registration portal on the website it actually does what my local polling place is and whether it is ada accessible. that's important information that's information that can be shared. however, as we set forth in the polling places are not accessible. another thing we talk about is personal stories matter. personal stories are powerful. i would love it if more and more people with disabilities to op-ed's that talk about their personal experiences voting or the struggle with getting identification to get to vote. as we saw voter id is an issue that is increasingly relevant to the conversation, particularly that intersection of disability, poverty and other minority communities.

also there are other things like ada voting checklist that are available online. lauren is the master of social media and just put together a list of senate candidates, one for candidates as well as in poorly political journalist. we have taken a tiered approach. we -- who will be interested at these issues. we've been working very hard -- i'll turn it over to her. >> so we are going to be going into the next panel very short but i wanted to let you know we will be setting up a forum like before have questions for the next one. i wanted to very quickly go over some of the social media work that we have been doing, like i

said what you can be doing. to not only tweak the political candidates but their staffers will. on the powerpoint which you can download it has links to the senate candidates and go between candidates in the race is that we've identified as being open and competitive when we think we can make a difference in getting people with disability, getting people to talk about disability issues. we recommend you to check that out and also if you are physically in the room, you have sheets that we've handed out. and so what else is important to do? are you doing something that we should be aware of? we have 100,000 people on the e-mail list, people assigned the. if you're doing something that you think is important in this issue, send it my way because we love amplifying good work that is happening out there. we have 57,000 facebook fans at 5000 twitter followers. if you are not follow us on twitter, please do.

we are trying to grow our twitter following. we really like to be involved. i give you some sample tweets. if anyone is interested in learning how to tweet more, better, et cetera, if you're in the room and got a break, during a break please come finally to a letter sent them. i have my computer analogy tutorial. if you're at home e-mail me. send your information and i will call you up and we will teach you how to do that. so we're going to open it up for a few myths of questions before we had to our next panel. so we will be glad to take any questions on this. like we said, this is serving as an overview of our day of training. so if there are any questions from a lot of what we touched upon will be delved into deeper. we will repeat your question into we have the floor mic set up.

[inaudible] >> some of the voting machines are not accessible. some people are still not able or it takes hours to vote. they have not been adequately trained in how to use the machines. i wanted to add that as another barrier. >> you are correct. the comment was about accessible voting machines. we notice in new hampshire in particular that they unveiled a new voting machine that for individuals who are blind were able to vote for the first time without assistance. we are very much into universal design that if someone can create a machine that everyone

can use regardless of your ability or disability, everyone else in the room would also be able to use it as well. so thank you for bringing up that issue. [inaudible] >> so the question is about mental health and addressing the in the political campaign. this is an extremely important issue. i would like to answer your question in a couple of layers. first of all is that people really deeply don't understand mental health issues. bears complete ignorance about

mental health and the range of mental health issues, and the range of mental health solutions that are possible. earlier i mentioned that there are 780,000 individuals with disabilities who are incarcerated. many of them have mental health issues as well. and in many cases we have almost made it illegal to have a mental health issue because it's so hard to get a job, and people wind up homeless and then homeless can be so illegal that people are jailed for being vagrants. and so there's a whole range of mental health issues. what we see is that between treatments and medications and community-based services that they can be tremendous outcomes, opportunities and improvements are people with mental health differences. but when you call a candidate crazy, or if after anna eshoo being the first thing that the

national rifle association does is to try and deflect attention from the sale of weapons of mass access to weapons to mental health issues to try and distract from their corporate roles, it increases the stigma for individuals with disabilities. one of the things that we've done is we've really tried to educate candidates. so if you look at this down ballot candidates, for example, question are we doing for senate and governor candidates can't be is if you go to website which i encourage you to do, we have the questions we're asking them but we also have some answers for them, some information and some places to go to. for example, we are constantly telling people who are candidates to go to nami and other organizations that are expert in those tissues to become better informed the but if you disagree with an

individual, calling him crazy really insults people who do have legitimate mental health differences. we really believe that education is very, very important. and in the presidential campaign, we have most seen this around the issue of these mass shootings where the nra has really tried to stigmatize people with mental health differences as a way to deflect attention from gun control issues, and candidates who are backed by gun issues were too quick to jump on that as a solution as opposed to recognizing that actually people with disabilities, including those with mental health differences, are the biggest victims of crime, more likely to become victims of crime, and that the vast majority of individuals who engage in

violent crime are not people who have mental health differences. that most violent crime is something from people who were in a domestic dispute or they no one on other or there is drug deal gone bad and that it is not a mental health difference. education for us has been a very big part of this. we have another session coming up, and i don't want to take away people's ability to have a short break, and so let me just see if we have anything else before -- okay. we have some amazing speakers coming back after the break. which is going to take an incredibly short break. and lauren applebaum is going to moderate our next session where marian vessels and rodney hood i'm going to speak to you going to speak about really and shoring access to events. and i just personally, i know there's going to be moderation by border i just want to say

that the ada centers are amazing and mary in the great job and that they are free and a double to everyone. i want to say a personal special thanks to rodney hood of jpmorgan chase. because of jpmorgan chase as a company has made employment of people with disabilities want of its top priorities. he is an incredible individual who served in public life but now at the bank he is enabling people to a better future. they are involved in something you hear about that is unbelievably exciting, and it is going to put in a plug for it because i have a pet peeve. here's my pet peace. preppie poor disenfranchised and to report it america, we tend to put inside. people who are hispanic go to la raza. people who are african-american, they go to the naacp. people with disabilities company

involved in the individual disability organization generally surrounding their one disability that the most identify with. i believe very strongly that the power in the future is about inclusion and integration where the tear down those pilots and enable people with disabilities to participate, if they're african-american, fully come naacp or any other organization or if they are hispanic and they are deaf or blind to be able to participate in la raza, and poor people who are african-american, asian, hispanic or whatever, to participate in disability organizations. i myself am obviously as you can see from looking at me, those of you who are cited, i'm white. i belong very proud to an organization of the disability organizations nationally. there are more than 100 organizations representing the

disability community and i will say that 100% of those organizations, their ceo and president are white. 100%. more than 100 organizations. our young leadership program, our fellowship program is looking for people who were from multiple disenfranchised populations. but yes, applied if your vocation that if you're a hispanic or from the lgbtq community for a new immigrant or asian or african-american, we want to ensure that the talent pipeline for the disability community reflects our nation fully. and so we're going to take a very short break and then we'll come back. you hear from two extraordinary leaders come marian vessels and rodney hood about how you can help on this. i know that some of you in the audience are experts on these issues but i want you to consider that session a train

the trainer. because the more of us who can lead this room are those are watching on c-span can leave and can train others on these issues, the better this nation will be for everybody, no matter whether you have a disability or you don't. all of us should be in a welcoming, respectful and equal nation where all of us can update a better future. i want to thank my panelists, lauren applebaum and philip pauli for the amazing presentation, and we will be back with you very shortly. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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were just waiting one moment to make sure captions and asl are ready. excellent. i want to thank you and welcome you to our second panel of the day which is on not forgetting people with disabilities when planning events. it's very easy to plan an event at your home or another location that may not be assessable and people also plan events not thinking that they want to exclude someone but just not thinking about what they need to do to make sure they are inclusive of everyone who may want to participate. we found on the trail as well with presidential candidates hosting events, a lot are fully assessable but sometimes there is a step to get in or the bathroom isn't assessable or other issues keeping people with a variety of disabilities from getting in or a lack of asl interpreter or captioning or other availability for people

who may need assess abilities. i want to introduce our first speaker today, marion vessels whose the director of the mid- atlantic ada center. she mentioned there are several ada centers around the country and they are free and we encourage you to take advantage of the opportunities they make available. as the director of the ada center, one of ten regional ada centers funded by the u.s. department of health and human services, marion vessels provides this ability awareness training and seminars on the disabilities act. the center has developed online meetings and events and conference guides that i suggest you check out and a customer service film called at your service that provides guidance to ensure full inclusion with those with disabilities. >> good morning. it's my pleasure to be here.

i'd like to talk about something we feel very strongly about and i hope you do to by the end of this presentation. as lauren mentioned, the ada national network is one of ten regional centers providing information guidance and training on the americans with disability act. as you heard jennifer mentioned recently, the ada just celebrated its 26 anniversary of the signing of the ada here in washington d.c. we have come a long way and many of us with disabilities now expect full inclusion and activities of all aspects, including voting, participation of political campaigns, going out to eat, work, worship and play. we sadly realize that still today, 26 years later, years later, we have a long way to go. the regional ada centers are here to provide you the support

you need to ensure full inclusion whether you're providing, hosting or attending events around voting this year. we have ten centers, we cover the whole united states, and so we encourage you to go to our website and find your regional center, connect with us. we answer any questions you have about the ada or disability issues. you can reach us at (#18)949-4232 as was mentioned, we are ended by the national institute of disability, independent living and rehab research which is a part of the department of health and human services. we are a free service. i want to talk about disabilities. i want to make sure we start with what is a person with disability. there's still a lot of confusion today. the ada protects people with all

kinds of disabilities both physical and mental. were talking about folks with mobility limitation like myself, folks with psychiatric conditions, intellectual intellectual disabilities, health conditions and other disorders. we also cover people with communication difficulty. those who affect hearing, vision and speech. i'm going to focus just a few minutes on physical disabilities because those are the ones people think about the most. you see the wheelchair symbol that emphasizes aspects of disability and a lot of people have a tendency to feel that people with mobility disabilities are basically people they're worried about or concerned about. you need to make sure your facilities are fully assessable that you have ramps, 36-inch clearance in walkways, 32-inch clear doorways, accessible bathrooms with grab bars and

easy access and a lot of people focus on that. we have tools on our website that provide guidance on how to make sure your facilities are fully assessable. we have an existing facility checklist to make it easy for you to determine if your facilities are assessable. we find that people are much more challenged when it comes to including people with communication disabilities. we are going to focus on a few of those today to give you some guidance. for people who are blind or have low vision, were going to talk a little bit about respectful and helpful interactions. were gonna talk about having courtesy. identify yourself when you approach or meet an individual with vision disability. let them know if you are leaving and who you are, what your name is. if you come near their personal space, give them a verbal alert that you are coming, that you're

leaving, who you are and when you leave. we all are probably familiar with watching someone give someone who is blind or low vision guidance so we want to make sure you ask them if they would like guidance first and foremost and then offer them your eye blow and described where you're going, what's in front of you and give them guidance to and from locations, if requested. there are a lot of auxiliary services for people who are blind or have low vision. we want to make sure that all the materials you are providing are provided in an assessable format and those formats are large print, braille, audio and electronics. we also encourage you to have qualified readers so people who are on site can read a document to an individual with vision disabilities.

there are such things as secondary audio programming to provide the description of visual elements during televised broadcast or recorded audio and visual presentations. with your printed materials you need to think about things before you print them. you want to make sure they're designed for legibility and reduce the need for the formats or individualized assistance for people with low vision. what does that mean? it means simple and easy to read documents. fonts without sans serif like arial or madonna. we want good contrast between text and the background so you don't want lots of watermarking and little settle pictures behind which makes it more difficult for people to be able to read. you want to make sure your materials are a nonglare finish

and you want simple, uncluttered design to make it easier for the distinguishing of visual and written materials. if somebody requests large print you want to make sure that it is 18-point fonts or better. that is considered basic, large print. an individual may say i really need 24-point or i need 30-point to to make sure it's usable and readable for me. these are easy to do. they can produce in-house because we all have electronic formats where the materials we develop. you take that you go on and determine the font and you printed out in a large format, sometimes 11 by 18 to make it easier to reproduce on a copier. if you only have the document imprint you can enlarge it from the copier to make sure that it is assessable for people

requesting that print. braille or audio recordings are another way to ensure full access. braille documents are produced by specialized equipment and you need to make sure that you produce that material in a format that can be braille. this takes advance preparation. you need to know who the braille house is, what your timeframe is so that when you tell someone you will be able to get materials to them you have a timeframe and you know how long it will take to get to the braille house and get it back. braille, a lot of times people don't think that people with vision disabilities use braille. estimates are between ten and 15% of the blind community use braille. for those who use braille, you must be willing and able to provide braille to them to ensure full access to your printed materials. also, many people require audio

recordings. these usually are done by professionals but you can do them on your own if you do well plant materials and resources to assure you have good, high-quality audio presentations of your material. most of us deal electronically. we send things electronically or on our website. we need to make sure the materials we are providing to those with vision disabilities are assessable for those who are using screen readers. you typically hear of the screen readers job that provides text to recognize speech. many of us are able to use verbal descriptions on our cell phone, our smart smart phone and our computers by going to google and having it read to us as well. all of those are formats that people with vision disabilities can be using.

some of the accessibility features we need to be concerned about when we are providing materials for both vision disabilities is to make sure we have all tags which are simple text descriptions on any vision or pictures or graphic. those are then read by the screen readers to tell people what those pictures are. you need to make sure that you have descriptions for videos and captions for those that need it for hearing disabilities. you need to make sure that you have hyperlinks that say what it is such as the mid-atlantic aba center instead of click here or the website name. you need to have some consistent meaningful styles and simple tables that are easy to navigate for people who are deaf or hard of hearing, you need to be prepared to provide written notes, printed materials,

assisted listening systems and, if requested, qualified interpreters either on-site, like we have here today, or through video, remote interpreting which allows someone off-site to be able to watch the interpreter on their computer. techniques such as computer aided real-time transcription which we have here in the room today and open and closed captioning of televised broadcast or any audiovisual presentation. interpreters use sign language as their manual system in order to communicate with folks who are deaf or hard of hearing. oral interpreters silently move their mouth, repeating speakers words for the benefit of the speech reader or a lip reader. american sign language, asl is a

true language. it developed naturally and its various distinct from english with a different syntax and vocabulary that make it just like spanish or french or german or any other foreign language. there are other manuals systems that are used by individuals who are deaf or hard of hearing that aren't languages but convey english word for word. you need to make sure when you are requesting a sign language interpreter to ask the person what type of interpreter they do need. we once heard someone asked for an interpreter and when they got there there was sign language interpreter and they thought they were getting spanish. working with an interpreter, went interacting with an individual who is deaf or hard of hearing and using an interpreter, it is a very important to communicate with the individual themselves and not with the interpreter. that's very hard to do because i think a lot of us may be

fascinated by watching the interpreter and want to watch the interpreter but you need to communicate directly with the interpreter, or with the death person and the interpreter should be off to your shoulder so the deaf person can watch both of you at the same time. i mentioned cart or captioning and they're both similar because they use technology to display typed record word for word with spoken communication and sounds that are in the room. cart helps not only people who are deaf or hard of hearing, people with intellectual disability, people with learning disabilities and people with foreign language challenges. cart is a very useful tool for many individuals. in large rooms it's very helpful if you're in the back of the room where you may not even here as well to be able to read the cart. video relay service has

transformed the way people who are deaf or hard of hearing can get communication. that's through the telephone. instead of using a tty, we use use video relay service which allows the person who is deaf access to the computer to be able to relate to an interpreter who will then sign language back and forth and communicate with someone on the phone and communicate that information back to the deaf person. they use asl instead of typed information. it's a much more organic tool in communicating with people who are deaf or hard of hearing. i hope you all have the opportunity to use that in communicating with folks who are deaf or hard of hearing. service animals. many individuals with disabilities use service animals. most of us are familiar with tools for those who are blind and in the last 15 or 20 years, the expansion of people who use

service animals has been greatly enhanced. we now have people using service animals who have epilepsy, diabetes, will trail users, psychiatric disabilities and neurological conditions. we have a number of useful tools on our website that we encourage you to use. we have a meeting guide that provides information on how to assure a meeting, any kind of event both indoors and out can be fully assessable by using our assessable meetings and events conference guide. it's free on our website to help you determine how to assure your meeting is fully inclusive. we have 20 minute customer service film that is captioned, audio described and in spanish

and there is a 22nd preview, i'm sorry a two-minute preview that will show you what it's all about. the bottom line, be proactive. establish nondiscrimination equal opportunity policies and include information about what you're doing, establish and publish a reasonable deadline for participants to make requests that will require individual responses and remember to include your speakers, your gas, your volunteers and others. you want to ensure full inclusion. train your staff disability etiquette, respectful interaction, providing, providing assistance, making sure you have the materials in assessable format and talk about assessable features such as location of relief for service animals. if you have a question, contact contact us. the ada national network is available at (#18)949-4232 and

visit our hospitality initiative for more customer service initiatives. thank you very much. >> thank you marion. we hope everyone was able to hear a lot of wonderful how to information in terms of being able to ensure your events are assessable. at the end there will be some time for questions if you would like to follow up. first i would like to introduce everyone to the corporate responsibility manager at jc morgan and chase company. he works in the office of nonprofit engagement where he is responsible for managing relationships with national organizations that assist the bank in strengthening communities, small business

development, providing community development, financial capability and affordable housing. prior to joining j.p. morgan chase, he was appointed by president george w. bush and confirmed by the senate as vice chairman of the national credit union administration, the regulatory body for americans credit union system. while there he served on the board of directors of neighbor works america along with counterparts from fdic, occ, federal reserve and hud. j.p. morgan chase, in collaboration with the world institute on disability recently launched the conference assess ability initiative which aims to fully integrate disability access issues into the content and enable people with disabilities to fully participate in critical, national discussions of economic opportunity and inclusion. now going to turn the floor over to rodney hood who will give an example of taking this accessibility to the next level.

>> thank you everybody and good morning. on behalf of j.p. morgan chase, i am absolutely thrilled to join you at the respectability summit jennifer, hats hats off to you and your fine team for really assembling some of the countries most active leaders, advocates and supporters in the disability community. j.p. morgan chase proudly supports respectability and its mission to increase the independence, security eight and opportunity and quality of life for the disability community. our firm realizes that people with disabilities experience economic hardship at rates exceeding the national average and face unique challenges with access to financial education and financial capability tools. at j.p. morgan chase we believe the private sector has both the responsibility and role to play in helping address economic and social challenges.

for us, it doesn't mean simply working alone or writing a check rather, it means working in partnership with nonprofit organizations such as respectability that are actively engaged in the communities plan. i'm thrilled that you allow me to come and join you today and talk about our new initiative. working in partnership with tom foley on the world institute on disability, j.p. morgan chase is providing physical access and subject matter integration into ten of the country's largest civil rights and community development conferences taking place this year. some of the conferences have already taken place and those have included the naacp. jennifer mentioned some of these earlier. some of the conferences thus far have included the naacp, the national fair housing alliance, the national council and just this very last weekend, the

national urban league. upcoming conferences will include the corporation for economic development and the group that lauren just mentioned , neighbor works america. ladies and gentlemen, our goal for the j.p. morgan chase initiative are twofold. we want to create more inclusive advocacy and community development communities. also, we want to expand the way people think about diversity and inclusion. what are some of the highlights of our conference assess ability initiative? we will have a concierge service for all of the conference participants. there will be a concierge booth at all of our events. there will be scholarships provided for travel to the conferences and for the conference registration. also there will be integration into the conference planning sessions, panel discussions and award ceremonies, that is subject matter experts on disability issues serving on the

panels, presenters themselves with disabilities and similar to what maryland was just saying, we will make sure in sponsoring the event there is close captioning, cart and asl interpreters. also ladies and gentlemen, one of the other components, we want to make sure there are specific panel discussions on disability related topics. with this initiative, j.p. morgan chase, together with with , that the world institute of disability, is actively interviewing to make community development and policy conferences more accessible to and inclusive of people with disabilities. large civil rights and community development conferences help to set the agenda for economic opportunity. the conferences we have selected are tracked with key decision-makers for the nonprofit, business and public sector communities. the initiative aims to fully integrate access issues into the conference content and enable

people with disabilities to fully participate in these critical national discussions of economic opportunity, and financial inclusion. to paraphrase, he is really excited as our wii because the conferences we are working with will give people with disabilities a seat at the table. i'm excited about working with many of you all in this room and the days to come and i would also like to encourage you to continue to not only learn about our initiative but we would like you to apply for some of the scholarships that may exist for the conferences that are coming up. again the corporation of economic development, neighbor works america, if you all have an interest in applying to them, please go to ww w.with.org. www.w id.org so you to can apply for some of the scholarships or a share those with your network. with that being said, thank you.

we are excited about this being our first year of having launched the assess ability project. thank you all again. >> thank you very much. i will now open the floor to questions. please keep your questions short as i will be repeating them for the benefit of our viewers watching on c-span. [inaudible] >> the question is for more description about the conference initiative. >> yes, sir, so when you go to www.view id.org you will learn about the world institute of disability and there's a space on there that talks about the conference assess ability initiative and the upcoming conferences they will be supporting.

>> this is wonderful. [inaudible] is this a one-year thing or a multiyear program? >> we are already looking at what we are going to be doing next year to fine tune and enhance some of the learning from this year but it was just announced this march here in washington that the american association with people of disability at their conference so i'm pleased to say we are already looking at how we can find ways to enhance it for next year. the question is organizing a political event in my state, how what i find and asl interpreter if you want to expand on finding a ride variety of request versus ability. >> that's a great question for specifically finding and asl and american sign language

interpreter, many states have an office for deaf and hard of hearing and either the governor's office or statewide office. that would probably one of the easiest and fastest way to find a qualified individual for asl. another would be a governor's office for individuals for deaf or hard of hearing as well as people who are hard of hearing. many governors offices have those as well. you can also call your local center for independent living and you can google that in the area that you will be working in whether it's the state capital or another major city and you can google the center for independent living or go to i l are you.org and i will have a

list of the centers for independent living and i would be a great place to find a local asl service provider to provide that in interpreter service. for other types of materials or resources they too would be a great one, you can also call the ada national network and they will connect you with entities within your state to be able to find an appropriate service provider. they can assist you in making sure that setting is fully assessable. [inaudible] the question is how do we address the issues of cost when an organization is asked to provide different accessibility

features? >> that's a really great question and we hear that a lot for any entity, we suggest you build in to your basic budget and assess ability line item because providing accessibility can be somewhat expensive, depending on what kind of assess ability request you have. for a nonprofit and government entities, there is no resource to provide that additional support. it needs to be built in and provided. for for-profit businesses, especially small businesses, the ability to provide either asl or other forms of communication can be paid for with the tax credit that's available for small

businesses. we have information for that on our website. for businesses in general, large businesses and/or state or local governments or nonprofit or volunteer organization, there are not many supports available and at that point, depending on the type of entity, it might be an undue hardship to provide some accommodation but you are required to provide as much as you can and as fully as you can and again, if you you have a question or concern about how to do that you should call the ada center we can walk you through the resources. many people say it's too expensive, we can't afford to do it without investigating and finding out what resources are available in the community. you might be able to find someone who's willing to volunteer to provide those services in the community. you are required under the ada to investigate all resources.

one of the things i would suggest is going back to the individual who has requested it and say, do you have recommendations for how i can find good quality resources to provide the support you are asking for. then see if they know of alternate resources if indeed a lot of political action groups are volunteers and they have no political background or funding and they're trying to do grassroots initiatives and there may not be any source of funding to provide information or resources for folks with disabilities. that doesn't get you off the hook. you really need to investigate and provide as much as you can and explore all opportunities. some of the opportunities i've already talked about would be places to go to investigate to be sure you are providing as much access as allowable under

the budgetary constraints you have. >> i agree wholeheartedly. i would just add for us, j.p. morgan chase's building that into our sponsorship. we are the ones that are incurring the cost for the cart and captioning, for the ial cell interpreters and whatnot. as you all host similar conferences in the future, ask ask you maybe have a line item for some your sponsors to consider supporting it if you're doing events in the future. we recognize it can be costly but it is so critically important. >> one of our sponsors today is ccac captioning. they give out small grants of which we received want to pay for our cart today. they are available specifically for politicians who are going to be using cart for the first time and other small organizations who might be interested so i would recommend looking into

seeing if there are other organizations that are really trying to push an agenda of inclusion that may provide a small, one-time grant. >> lot of times you have groups that do programming like this. they're being manned by volunteers, is there a a checklist they can go to to figure out how can they be assessable. i work with the county commission that didn't know where to go to. >> the question is about a checklist for ada accessibility which, yes it does exist. >> yes, the events conferences and meeting guide that i talked about that's on our website does have exactly that. it covers small meetings, it

could be that you're inviting the community to come and maybe only ten people come but if you want to talk about if people need assess ability and then get them to request it. it talks about how to do registration, how to outreach to the community, what the fiscal physical space should look at and how to secure asl interpreters, materials on how to provide it in alternate format, all of those issues are covered. that would be exactly what i think you are looking for. it's not just a strict checklist. it's in different segments so you can enter it as a host of a meeting, as the planner for the meeting or as an attendee of the meeting. >> is this just assess ability in the sense of communication or does it deal with employment of

persons with disability? i'm not sure exactly what the topics of your conference discuss. >> the question is, i believe you're asking what are the conferences, specifically what they do and pay attention to? >> okay, great the conferences that we are highlighting this year are all around community development, financial inclusion and civil rights. as you know the naacp, the urban league, these are all large civil rights organizations that oftentimes are discussing national issues regarding financial access and inclusion. when we think about the disability community, many of them are disproportionately left out of the financial mainstream and what we were finding is that while some of them are discussing financial accessibility and inclusion but

some people were not able to participate. in creating the conference initiative ability initiative want to provide people a disability an opportunity to attend. when we provide the scholarship, the disability ambassadors, when they are sitting in some of those panel discussions, they are asking the speakers what are you doing around disability rights and advocacy. are you thinking about disability communities when you're looking at new financial products and tools and resources i don't want to imply that folks are not discussing those opportunities before but what we are doing is keeping it front and center and really trying to make sure that folks who have never been engaged with some of the conferences are now able to go in a meaningful and impactful way. we asked they not only ask questions and interject questions but we asked they keep a blog that they really add to

the content of these particular events. >> is jennifer mentioned before, it's something that's extremely important and by including people with disabilities in conferences that are focusing on other issues of civil rights and disenfranchisement, maybe the intersection alley hadn't been discussed before, people from both communities can learn from each other and further their agendas together. we have time for one more question. >> does that answer your question in terms of making it front and center and also the integration into some of the panel discussions, making sure that when there are agenda topics around disability and things like that nature, things that may have never taken place before the initiative. >> which are to conference discuss that?

>> without a doubt because again we are having the opportunity to help that particular, we are able to encourage topics that the recent conference we hosted in baltimore with the urban league, they had a career fair and there was a disability booth there for folks who want to get employment opportunities with disabilities. so it's a whole number of things that can be made available. those are the things we are hoping to do because the national conference all address those issues. i'm very thrilled, thank you, i share your excitement. [inaudible]

>> actually, for using our scholarships, if you go to www.w id.org, that gives you the opportunity to apply for the scholarships we make available and that covers your transportation and registration for the event. other than that, the conferences are open to other folks who want to do their registration on their own accord but we are having a separate group of investors who get to go. all of the conferences, again, people, people from all walks of life can apply. you can register, but again for our conference, w ww.w id.org. >> time for one last question. >> i've asked election committee to make events assessable and do training. this attitude and preconceived

notion of what's doable and a miss understanding a of times about what's needed. i'm wondering what can be done to try to educate people like that who have the money but then they're having a problem seeing the importance of it or taking the time for it. >> organizations that may be the money to pay for the assess ability features but their attitudes, they don't think about doing it or understand why. >> you specifically mentioned boards of election or other entities and a lot of groups don't really consider people with disabilities as part of a group they should be reaching out to. we want to change that dynamic. we want to make sure people with disabilities are brought to the table. part of that is making sure that things are assessable so they can get to the table either communication wise or physically

one strategy i would say would be to engage the disability community and have them actively request information to be brought to the table. talk to your centers for independent living. talk to your commissions on disability in the community. talk to specific disability groups. the national federations of the blind, the national association for the death, all of these have chapters within your community. engage those communities to be able to request and demand the training to be able to be across the table and be part of that engagement so they can really be active participants invoking community integration. it needs to be a groundswell from the bottom up and then actively talk to other entities, elected officials, making sure

they are aware that people in the community want to be engaged and requesting that kind of engagement. there's any number of levels of people that can be involved but it has to be a commitment and a movement. you can start it. each of us has the responsibility to ensure full inclusion. that's how the ada works. that's how our democracy works. if we each take on that responsibility and that commitment to ensure full inclusion of people with disabilities. >> each of us has the responsibility to ensure full inclusion of people with disabilities, whether you have a disability or not, that's a wonderful way to close this panel. we. we are going to take a short break and at 11:00 o'clock representative brad chairman whose office helped to secure this room will be addressing the conference and following that we have a wonderful panel of some

really great journalists including eleanor cliff of the daily beast, norman of american enterprise institute and tribune media services and richard wolf will be talking about campaign 2016 and beyond, beyond, insight from the media, campaigns, public policy, the supreme court and people with disabilities. we'll be taking a short break now and we look forward to starting up again at 11:00 a.m. thank you, god.

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[inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] [inaudible conversation] this conference on voters with disabilities is taking about a 15 minute break. when it resumes representative

brad sherman is expected to address the group about employment opportunities with people with disabilities. then a panel on media campaign geared toward handicap voters. more this afternoon on discussions reaching voters by making electronic communications available to disabled voters. and an address by the disability outreach director with the democratic national committee. also discussion with the final panel on ways of encouraging handicap voters to participate in the global process at the grassroots level. during this break we will show you the beginning of the conference. >> good morning. i am delighted to welcome everybody here to this panel discussion or series of panel discussion that is by and for people with disabilities across america. my name is jennifer and i myself within an individual with a

disability and i know what it means to parent an amazing child with multiple disabilities. i believe that people with disabilities deserve to be able to achieve the american gene just like anyone else. i also believe that the only way for that to happen is for those of us who either have disabilities or have loved ones with disabilities to take political action in our own hands to really create our own better destiny and our own better future. i am here on behalf of respectability. we are a new nonpartisan, nonprofit organization based here in the washington d.c. area that is working on a frontline to advance opportunities for people with disabilities. we have a number of speakers from both sides of the aisle, both democrat and republican. we have closed captioning and we

also have american sign language and i really appreciate our guests here today and this is fully assessable. additionally, if you are following us on c-span, or if you want to have copies of the presentation, they are available on our website. www.respectability usa.org. all of our power points are also screen reader assessable for people who are vision impaired. i want to thank ccac for cosponsoring this event in helping make it possible because we are providing this as a free public service for people in the public. i am really appreciative of their efforts. i also want to thank our amazing staff. we have a terrific team and the head of the team are our young

leaders. we have a national fellowship program that is young people with and without disabilities who want to enable a better future for the 56 million americans with disabilities and they work together in cohort where they do skills building, advocacy, writing, they create the respectability report and the really on the front lines and we feel we work for them. we have a tremendous cohort of young fellows. i want to thank brian who is our fellows director, brian rowe who is here and i also want to let all of the fellows know how much we appreciate you and to let anyone who's watching no that we are looking for new fellows for the fall cohort and for the spring cohort and it's a wonderful fellowship program for people who want to come to washington, gain some skills and contacts can really go into

careers in public policy advocacy and media. so i am hoping that my powerpoint is working and it does appear that is the case and i'm just going to start by saying again respectability is a nonprofit organization and all the materials for this program are on our website which again is w ww.respectability usa.org. one in five americans has a disability. one in five. that's 56 million americans. additionally, a lot lot of people don't understand what disabilities are. yes disabilities can be that somebody uses a wheelchair. that is a kind of disability as his blindness or being deaf. so is autism, so is mental health, the majority the majority of americans who have a disability, it is a nonvisible disability.

it's very important to understand that all of us are facing stigmas, barriers, optics engine obstacles that are keeping us from achieving what we want to achieve which are jobs, employment, empowerment and empowerment and a better future. of course to achieve that is very important to be equally involved in the political process. on our board of respectability we are very proud to be completely nonpartisan or bipartisan and we have board members from both sides of the aisle, all of of them are terrific but i want to just highlight congressman steve bartlett and tony carrillo co-authored the americans with disabilities act in the u.s. congress 26 years ago and they have never stopped being true champions of people with disabilities. the ada was passed 26 years ago, we still have so much yet to accomplish and that's why am so pleased that you are all here

with us today. 51% of american voters report that they have a loved one with a disability or they themselves have a disability. disability is a very large minority group but it's also the only minority that you can join at any time due to accidents, illness or aging. if you don't have a disability now, you might want to think of yourselves as temporarily able because you never know what could happen in the future. we are all in this together and it does impact the majority of voters. i also want to say there are key things with people with disabilities that we need to pay attention to. one of them is the sexual abuse with people with disabilities that starts at a high rate with children with disabilities. i know this personally as a person with disability who could not read or write until i was much older than most children

and i had very low self-esteem and i trusted someone at school who i should not have trusted and when i was only in the sixth grade, i was raped. unfortunately that is very common for people with disabilities, children and adults alike but it's not something you hear discussed in the political agenda and it is one of many reasons we need to have political power. the second reason that we need political power is that individuals with disabilities are not graduating high school at the rate they need to and indeed only 61% of americans with disabilities graduate high school, so it is very important to address that because high school attainment is very critical to job attainment and very closely linked to whether or not someone enters the prison pipeline. every single year 300,000 americans with disabilities exit the school system.

some with proud degrees in others after being suspended wrongfully because people didn't understand their disability. those people need strong transitions to get into the workforce so they can have jobs and opportunity just like anyone else. only one of three americans who have a disability is working with the job. that's a total of 22 million people. the vast majority of them, according to polls do want to be gainfully employed. by the way, we are encouraging competitive, integrated employment, real jobs at real wages. poverty is extreme for people with disability. in fact, i know a lot of people think poverty and they think of racial dynamics, african-americans, hispanics, women.

if you look at the census data, tragically people with disabilities are the poor of the poor. they are the poorest of the poor, poor, poor than african-americans, hispanics or women, and if you are multiple marginalized because you are african-american and you have a disability or you are hispanic and a disability or hispanic with a disability, it is even more challenging. there is a real problem in america and there is a massive and growing gap in the labor force participation rate between people with and without disability. this is something we believe should be very much discussed in the political war of ideas. :

and getting bylines and getting published. we are very proud of the fact we are very data-driven, always looking for her performance, better metric. one of the reasons for that is because if we don't address these issues, people with disabilities free we have one of two outcomes. either their living at home on the parents couch into the parents died, in which case they're living on their brother's couch and living on government benefits. 11 million working age americans are currently living on government benefits. or in many cases tragically they've entered the school to prison pipeline. there are currently 700 -- >> back to this conference on voters with a disability.

it will be resumed shortly with remarks by brad sherman. >> nor panels of this afternoon. live coverage here on c-span2. >> he is also help our organization and, indeed, he is our -- for this event and we are a full to them for providing this room here in this congress for this training seminar. there is no -- than congressman ratcheting. thanyo