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
MARK RICCOBONO: Good morning, everybody! It's great to be back with you again for our joke bus tenBroek law symposium and I want to start by thanking you for being a part of this symposium. Because you're showing up, you're being part of the community leaders.
Seeking to normalize the experience that we have right here. And not only to normalize it here as we do, but to create it and make it part of the rest of the world around us is really important. Normalizing that experience is about recognizing people with disabilities are simply part of the natural normal human experience. What we experience is not as the rest of the world as understanding. So we come together at this gathering to see if we can spread our authentic understanding here to the rest of the world, which as you know, because you're in the trenches doing it, is no tall order. And it's frustrating. I heard at least three people use the word frustrating this morning, just walking around listening to the conversations and saying hello.
Another important part of our coming together is leveraging the wisdom of our community to learn from and also benefit other intersecting communities. Where we can find commonality. Of course we know from our experience that disability does not discriminate on any other characteristic. So in our coming together here, we celebrate the reality that we are truly stronger together. In the National Federation of the Blind, we imagine a world where blind people are valued and respected in society. Valued and respected in society. And our legal advocacy work plays a critical role in that work, and I want to thank each and every one of you because you're an important part of contributing to the extensive legal advocacy work of the National Federation of the Blind.
Just to highlight a few of those areas, of course we are in 2024, it's an election year, so voting and the participation of voters with disabilities is really important, right? We live in a nation that has the technological capacity now almost 50 years ago to put people on the moon, but we can't figure out how to make voting systems secure and accessible. At least that's what they tell us when we ask for equal access to voting. Yet it's a that if you're an astronaut and you're on the international space station, we have no problem with you electronically returning your ballot. But if you're a person with a disability and you want to do that, forget it. You're labeled as not important. I want to tip my hat to everybody in this room. I know that many of you are working on voting accessibility, so thank you for that work. Because that is so important.
[ Applause ]
So many other areas, right? I raising expectations in employment. Another important area that all I know in this room are working on. I want to definitely give a shout out to the team at Brown, Goldstein & Levy and our friends in Ohio for a huge victory in the Senate workshop case and just to show you that justice is slow, but progress is being made. But great work there in so many other areas. One that really rings through to me on a day to day basis is protecting the rights of people with disabilities to be parents and caregivers. It's astonishing that in 2024, society still makes efforts to break the bonds of love when a person with disability is involved. And the fact that we are working collectively to change that, not just through legal protections in individual cases, but through legislative cases but also training of the people who are working in these systems, really, really important.
Now those are just a few things that this community is doing, and that's why we appreciate getting together with you in this forum on an annual basis, because we could not do this work without this community. As Anil has already pointed out, right, all of us are part of organizations that have limited resources. So we're able to stretch those resources because of the community that we have here to bring our knowledge and expertise so thank you for that.
I did also want to mention, since Anil noted this is the 20th anniversary of this building here. I don't know if we mentioned it last year. I don't think we did, so I'll mention that that one of the new forward looking things that we're doing, is that in the near future, before the end of this decade, this building on the second floor, will also include the Museum of the Blind Peoples Movement.
[ Applause ]
It will be the first cultural institution that centers the stories of blind people and elevates how blind people and working with other people with disabilities have worked to raise expectations for themselves and society, and I'm confident, confident that the legal advocacy community and the intersections with the advocacy work of individual blind people in local communities, will be a part of that. If you want to learn more about it, nfb.org/museum. But I'm looking forward to the future, joke bus tenBroek Law Symposium we'll be able to have a tour of the museum and most importantly right now, interested in your ideas. Our members have said, this museum should teach all other cultural institutions how to do accessibility and inclusion right. At least we need a lot of ideas. We know how to do a lot of things in accessibility and inclusion, but we need your expertise to cover those areas we don't know about. So I would love for you to be part of that.
Finally, this law symposium is an annual commitment we make. And we make it because we recognize that we have an important role to play, that we need your help. And we can learn from you. We hope that you learn from us in coming together. And my final charge for us is to remember that we're seeking forward progress. We can learn from the great history we have. We can learn from the victories we've made. We can learn from some of the missteps we've made. But our goal is forward progress. This community that we create here, our coming together, the relationships, is the bond that helps us advance normalization of people with disabilities in society. So again, I close where I started. Which is to thank you for making the commitment to be with us, not just with us, but contributing to the advancement of our work. I'm looking forward to learning from the conversations, and so I'll say let's go forward to a future where our living in the world is not simply a right, but a responsibility. Thank you.
[ Applause ]