This is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
SANHO STEELE-LOUCHART: Good morning, welcome to the 2025 Jacobus tenBroek Disability Law Symposium. Thank you so much for being here. I'm Sanho Steele Louchart, you'll be hearing quite a bit for me today.
But for now, I would like to introduce our president, Mark Riccobono.
(Applause)
MARK RICCOBONO: Good morning, everybody! And welcome, happy spring by the way!
First day of spring. That's a good thing.
Seems like a good new hope kind of kickoff for this gathering. It is a pleasure to welcome our good friends in the disability rights community back here to the National Federation of the Blind.
If you are here for the first time, welcome, and thank you for joining this important community of disability rights activists. And if you are here for, I don't know, the 18th time or so, welcome back. And congratulations for the great work that you have helped to contribute to over these many years of coming to this community space. So Disability Justice and The Rule Of Law: Protecting Our Right to Live in the World.
When Jacobus tenBroek was a young, emerging scholar of the United States constitution and sought to begin organizing blind people in 1940, the idea that the right of people with disabilities to live in the world or of the right of people with disabilities to live in the world, certainly was not well established. And I would say it was not even believed in by many systems of power, maybe all of them, in our nation.
Yet, Dr. tenBroek believed in the idea. And he collected together as many people as he could to bring their lived experience to the halls of power as a mechanism for change. One by one, he mobilized a community of people and they found ways to synergize with other like minded individuals and movements across the nation to make change.
Together they established the idea that we have the inherent right, the inherent right of people with disabilities to live in the world. And although we gather together at this symposium to talk about protecting that right, and trust me, there are many fronts on which we need to play defense, I want to encourage this group to take a different strategy.
To lean in to this community of belief we have right here, belief and understanding, to find ways to expand those rights.
It's not something that's getting talked a lot about right now, but I think this group, this gathering, has always come together to define for ourselves as a community what we want, the contours of disability rights to be in our nation. And we must, we must continue to do that, even in the face of great challenges.
We in the National Federation of the Blind are prepared to be just as tenacious and aggressive as we always have in undertaking that work, and we're eager to work with our partners in the disability community to help get that work done.
I'm welcoming you to our House today. And recognize that what we have put together here has taken lots of effort.
Again, one person at a time, 1 dollar at a time. And I want to extend our deep interest and commitment to working with other leaders in the disability rights community to find ways to strategically tackle the challenges that are in front of us.
Now truly is the time for us to bring together thought leaders in our community and figure out the strategies for where we should put our limited time, energy, and imagination to advance the opportunities that we can create together for people with disabilities in our society.
I want to share that, especially here on the first day of spring, I'm hopeful about the future.
Now, not because of anything that's happening outside of this room, but because of what the potential is right here in this room.
This group of people, all of us together, working together, I feel confident that protecting the right of people with disabilities to live in the world is a certainty.
And I certainly hope that many of you, if not all of you in this room, are prepared to lean in to that belief as well.
Now, just a couple other quick comments before we get on to the deep dive of the legal landscape. And the first is to tell you if you don't know, and remind you if you had known, that the National Federation of the Blind has committed to designing and building the future Museum of the Blind People's Movement right here in this building. It's a big project we have underway.
In addition to radically centering the lived experience of blind people in a cultural institution, we've made an even bigger commitment to design a museum that is inclusive from the very beginning of the design stage through completion and we want, as part of that, to capture your ideas about what that would mean to our disability rights community. You know, in most cultural institutions think about, to the extent they do, including people with disabilities, it's generally, at best, an afterthought.
We're trying to flip the script on that and figure out how to design inclusively from the beginning, and that means imagining spaces that don't exist anywhere else today. And so we would love to have your ideas, whether you're blind or not, about what that would mean, in terms of inclusion and accessibility.
We will have some opportunities to capture some of your reflections, ideas about your experience with inclusion, or maybe I should say lack of inclusion at other cultural institutions, and your dreams about what would that mean to be able to come into a space that truly was designed to include people with disabilities, to include everybody from the beginning. So we want to capture some video, some reflections.
We recognize that our disability rights community is a really important part of this journey for us. And as we capture the work we're trying to do, we want your ideas and reflections as well, because it will help us motivate and mobilize the next generation of advocates and allies, and at the same time create a cultural space which will be a research center and model for all other cultural spaces out there.
I would love to have time to talk to you about the other priorities of the Federation but we have a pretty busy agenda the next two days. So in closing, I should share with you that in addition to the general advocacy work we do, we are very busy with pushing back on the harmful effects of the work of the current administration by doing public outreach to the media, mobilizing grassroots members to inform elected leaders in Congress and elsewhere, looking to create connections for former blind federal employees.
And we are prepared to, and working on, using our legal tools. And so in the coming weeks, you will hear about our efforts to partner with various disability organizations, some of them represented in this room, to bring cases against the federal government to push on actions that we believe will harm people with disabilities.
I know that many of you in this room are undertaking similar initiatives. I know that those cases weren't in your playbook for 2025, may have changed your priorities.
And so let me give you a big thank you for being a partner in this work with the National Federation of the Blind.
Finally, you know, bringing this group together every year takes energy and imagination, but it also takes resources. And I want to close by thanking our sponsors, our friends who have contributed financial resources to make sure that we can continue to bring this community together and build a future full of opportunities for people with disabilities.
Welcome, and let's have a great symposium!
(Applause)
SANHO STEELE-LOUCHART: All right. And now I will lower it because of course I'm much shorter. Or somewhat shorter, I should say.
All right.
Thank you, President Riccobono, and thank you everyone that's here.
Again, my name is Sanho.
I am the Legal Program Coordinator here at the National Federation of the Blind. It is my honor and my privilege to get to come to work every day and get to help blind people and people with multiple disabilities all throughout the country in a variety of ways, and so many of my esteemed colleagues and friends are in this room. And it is such an incredible, incredible gathering.
Thank you all for making the time and for putting forth the energy, not just to do what you do every day at work, but also to come and spend a couple of your days here with us.
This is where the magic happens.
This is where our community of advocates and attorneys and allies comes together to do the hard work and to plan strategically for both what's already happened, how to bounce back from that, and also what comes next. And so I really cannot say thank you enough.
Now, today, I am going to next discuss a couple of Housekeeping points.
Let me get my notes in order here. There we are. So first, I have our list of sponsors.
President Riccobono has just pointed out that our work takes time, it also takes money.
Thank you so much to our sponsors for this event who get to contribute to such meaningful work, both for the NFB and for the Jacobus tenBroek Law Symposium. To our sponsors the AARP Foundation, Brown, Goldstein & Levy, to Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld, thank you. To Democracy Live, I see. To the Burton Blatt Institute, thank you. To Bazelon Mental Health, thank you.
To the Law Student Admission Council, we recognize you as well.
Thank you so much.
The McGuinness Law Group, TRE Legal Practice, thank you. Whiteford Taylor and Preston, thank you so much. And Disability Rights Advocates, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, and to Paralyzed Veterans of America. Thank you all so much.
I really can't say it enough. You're going to hear that message a few times throughout the next couple of days.
Because without you, this wouldn't be possible.
Next, I wanted to cover the opportunity to donate. For those of you who would like to support our programs, our legal advocacy, our educational work, our policy work, where we have an entire team who works on Capitol Hill every day.
If you would like to donate, there are two ways to do that.
There are two easy ways to do that.
The first would be, we have promotional materials throughout the building.
You are able to use the link or the QR code on those promotional materials to be able to be directed to our website where you can donate very conveniently there.
Alternatively, you can go to nfb.org/donate and that will redirect you to our donation page.
Next, I would offer that there are going to be any number of things happening over the next couple of days, and I will not be able to be everywhere. So to the colleagues who are willing to assist here at the NFB, we're so appreciative of the amazing work that you have done, from our AV team here, Will and the people who are assisting him, our tech team who have made sure that all our PowerPoints are workable and are going to be where they need to be, to our communications teams and our logistics teams, our events planners, really and truly. There are so many people behind the scenes who are not me, who are making this come together.
I wanted to say thank you to all of our team, because these are folks who, they're in advocacy not because they're an attorney, but because they love this work in a different way, just as much.
I'm going to read our belief message that informs much of the work that we do, then I will introduce our esteemed panelists.
All right.
The National Federation of the Blind advances the lives of our members and all blind people in the United States.
We know that blindness is not the characteristic that defines you or your future. Every day we raise the expectations for blind people, because low expectations create obstacles between blind people and our dreams.
Our collective power, determination, and diversity achieves the aspirations of all blind people.