July is Disability Pride Month! This month marks the anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which was signed on July 26th, 1990.

Disability Pride Month celebrates the disabled community's culture, identity, and leadership. It’s important to celebrate this month more now than ever due to the shrinking access to services and benefits, and the rise of stigma and discrimination surrounding the disabled community. It's also crucial to acknowledge the barriers that people with disabilities face in our society. We can help the disabled community by amplifying the voices of people with disabilities and advocating for disability rights and inclusion. 

The World Works Better with Us

Each year, The Arc's National Council of Self-Advocates creates a theme for the year's Disability Pride Month. This year’s theme is “The World Works Better with Us”, which highlights how disability-led advocacy has led to changes that benefit all of society. 

So many common things were fought for by the disabled community but benefit everyone:

• Curb cuts were created to help wheelchair users, but help people who walk with strollers, roll carts on and of sidewalks, and much more.
• Audiobooks were created for people with vision impairments but many people without impaired vision enjoy listening to audiobooks.
• Closed captioning was created to support people who are hard-of-hearing but are regularly used by people who are not hard-of-hearing.
• Voice dictation was created to help people with limited hand mobility work on documents, search the web, and more but is now also used to help people multitask.

The world truly does work better thanks to contributions made by those who advocate for people with disabilities. 

Supporting Accessibility, Equity, and Inclusion at BHN

BHN has a Accessibility Committee that is dedicated to enhancing accessibility accommodations for the people we serve and our staff across all of our facilities. The committee works closely with Human Resources to ensure that our services and workplace environment reflect legal compliance and a culture that emphasizes inclusion, respect, and continuous improvement.

This year the Accessibility Committee helped to initiate these updates:

• The installation of EZ doors in our Agawam clinic
• The addition of more accessibility parking spaces and lot lighting for our Carlson Recovery Center
• Helped our benefits team redesign themselves to better address ADA accommodation requests from staff
• Our facility ticket request system now includes drop downs to include requests for ADA accommodations.

Celebrating Disability Pride Month

This month, we celebrate the contributions, perspectives, and achievements of people with disabilities and reaffirm our commitment to building accessible, welcoming environments where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.