Web MasterLEADERSHIP HUB CONNECTION
- Comment on or recommend an article, video or podcast on increasing awareness of barriers to access.
- Continue our discussion on access/accessibility online and share your reflections on the Charter commitments that resonate with you personally.
- Continue developing your community project ideas – engage in conversations online.
- Fill out the Ideas Incubator Planner and come prepared on Day 4 with a rough project outline.
TAKE ACTION!
Find examples of the D&I Charter Commitments in action.
REFLECTION
Reflect on the role play activity/discussion and think about how you will approach future scenarios that are similar.
I found a useful link called Community Tool Box that discuses Using Outreach to Increase Access (Chapter 23).
This chapter examines five tactics – action plans – for modifying access, barriers, and opportunities:
Reducing access to unhealthy products and practices
Enhancing access to services, healthy practices and products, and information
Extending opportunities for people of lower income
Increasing access for people with physical disabilities
Using outreach to increase access
Please see the link below:
http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/implement/access-barriers-opportunities/overview/main
I liked this article and it’s explanation around access.
“Opportunities” is not simply another word for “access,” but refers to something slightly different. By making access easier, and by removing barriers, you can create more opportunities for people to use community services.”
I feel this is a huge issue within both the educational sphere and social services.
This is a great resource Jasmine, thank you for posting! I am sure others can get a lot of great tools and information from here.
REFLECTION: Watching the role play in Session 3 brought up what I feel is an important dilemma/conflict for me. How do I stand up for myself and what I think is right, in a way that is eloquent, persuasive, and doesn’t have negative or violent repercussions? Perhaps the answer is “That’s not possible”, and I must always be willing to give things up if I really want to fight for social justice. It shames me that I’m still working up the courage to call my MP and participate in email campaigns when Black and Indigenous and disabled folks are out in the streets and doing sit-ins and protesting. But people have also told me that I don’t need to go to rallies for my efforts to be worthwhile, I don’t need to go to rallies to engage in “activism”. Maybe there’s a compromise where I keep my eyes and ears open to what people out in the streets say they need, and then act as a kind of all-purpose backup person. But in small interactions, like the microaggression of the role play scenario, I think there’s a lot to be said for stating clearly how an interaction has affected me, and how interactions can be improved in the future. “I feel singled out when you’re calling me like this. Can we discuss this issue as a class?”
Hi Melanie
You raise some really important points. The truth is that some of the best and most important feedback I have been given did not feel good initially. Something I try to consider when I am about to say something that may be hurtful or challenging is who am I serving by saying this, myself or the other person. I try to ask myself this honestly because people can tell when someone else is being self serving. If your feedback is self serving it only serves to impact you. If your feedback is truly meant to serve yourself and the other person then both of you will experience that result. If the feedback only serves the other person you may feel unsatisfied.
I will also say that activism requires ‘activity’ but does not specify what that activity actually is. I think the best thing to do is start in a place of strength where what you share you do so with confidence, commitment and courage.
Honesty, straightforwardness and clarity in many ways requires courage. I also think it would be valuable to explore these concepts further.
I have added something I wrote about my own experience to our shared file upload.
Please also see links to this same document and a journal article also.
This link will take you to an article written by Tanya Titchcovsky titled The Not-Yet-Time of Disability in the Bureaucratization of University Life
http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1295/1331
This link will take you to the paper I wrote titled Doing Disability Reluctantly Disability in the Workplace – By Invitation Only
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kyweW20fjsz4L2LbFP2zrNofjcfltmF0D7d2MZV7ia0/edit?usp=sharing
TAKE ACTION: I have seen community groups and workplaces that I am a part of implement the Charter Commitments without actually knowing they exist (to my knowledge anyway).
For Communities: QTBIPOC Mississauga brings together queer racialized folks in Peel Region to fight suburban isolation and celebrate ourselves.
For Workplaces: CANVAS Arts Action Programs keeps its growing, diverse team grounded with a Youth Advisory Group, Anti-Racism Committee, and regular reviewing of its programs, structures, and feedback mechanisms.
For Services: The tenant rights hotline that I work for puts resources into helping tenants organize and fight, paying employees fair wages, and making sure both the office space and the hotline itself are accessible.
QUESTION #2: I couldn’t remember where we left off in Session 3 about access to services, but I was thinking about academia and how it is an inaccessible and oppressive institution. The cost, the racism, the difficulty of engaging in massive classes (and sometimes small ones), the implicit and explicit judgment of peers and instructors, the unwillingness of the administration to change how things are run, and the unforgiving nature of education and assessment is bad for folks who aren’t disabled and even worse for folks who are. When I think about my alma mater, the downtown UofT campus, I think of a place where the administration is out of touch with students, a place where workers of all kinds are swallowed up in underpaid jobs, a place that lets hate speech flourish without consequences, and a place that (physically) could be open to the wider community but instead just shuts off whole city blocks.
Putting resources toward equity, paying workers and instructors fairly, providing adequate housing and food for students who need it, being accountable for past mistakes and open to change, and acknowledging that students can teach as well as learn…from what I experienced and what I saw/heard other people experience, I feel that this is what UofT needs to do to make education accessible and equitable.
When I think about access I think about how we learn about access. What do we learn when we are young about what it means to have something or own something. Moreover where do we learn these things? Access is a question of ability but in my thoughts the ability to do, have and own. Something I have been thinking about is that much of what we learn (outside of our parents) we learn from books, media, teachers etc. The only way to expand access is to expand who has the power to communicate and what they communicate. For example if we communicate that ramps are ways and means of traversing spaces then this becomes a shared understanding. If we communicate that persons that use wheelchairs require ramps this then presents ramps as required for wheelchair users.
In many ways by specifying types of access with visual images etc we continue to limit access. In short access and disability is an active thing that we do. We actively disable people in spaces by not providing access. In many ways we add and sometimes create disabling environments by privileging particular types of bodies and ways of thinking and moving.
I am sharing an article from/about professor Tanya Titchcovsky who has some interesting thoughts on the subject of access. Full disclosure the article is an academic article that can be challenging to read. I have also added two things I have written that clarify my thoughts on access and disability.
thanks for sharing everyone
Hello!
This isn’t exactly on topic, but I found it very insightful. It’s about how someone pushed to increase access, and ended up having to use law as an avenue for change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mvoj-ku8zk0
When I think about access, I think of the foot soldiers of the civil rights movement who allow me the access that I have today. In the wake of the Trump administration and the unnecessary police actions murdering Black men, the 42% high school failure rates among Black male students and that Black females earns 40% less than a Caucasian male I must step out of my comfort zone and continue to fight for access. The reality is that the civil rights movement must continue in this generation. The fight is not over. There is a lot more marching to be done. I must be a change agent to create access-it is not going to be easy or comfortable-but I must begin with me.