JUSTICE SHORTER: Good afternoon, thank you for the music, I appreciate you, good afternoon everyone, I'm Justice Shorter, thank you all for joining us and for this phenomenal session we are hoping to have on disability justice and disaster assistance.
I am joined by the phenomenal Valerie Novack, you want to say hey?
VALERIE NOVACK: I'm here, I was just plugging in my headphones, hello everybody thank you for joining us today.
JUSTICE SHORTER: We are happy to have each and every one of you, typically when we do these sessions we start off with music so you were listening to Chuck Brown with a little bit of DC go-go music.
We know this happens in Baltimore so we thought it would be fitting to get us moving and grooving and ready to talk about disability justice which has a ton of creative roots in terms of music and writing and theater so we wanted to infuse that energy today with our session just immediately, as soon as we got started here so I'm happy that we were able to do that and I hope you enjoyed the tunes.
Let's jump in.
Valerie, if you can move us to the grounding slide.
So we wanted to start off with a couple of announcements.
If you need accommodations at any point please feel free to connect with our producer, Jen White.
She is one of the participants in the group here.
If you have any sort of needs, if the captions stop at any point or something goes wrong and you need additional support feel free to put that in the chat or send a direct message to Jen White, she is the producer for this session.
We like to start out sessions with grounding.
So we want to acknowledge where we are here and that is to center individuals with disabilities and disaster assistance but more specifically we are here to acknowledge the experiences and the expertise and the contributions of black indigenous, Latin X, Asian folks, so we want to center those perspectives, those narratives in our conversations today.
We want to make sure that we express the commitment to centering those not just in he remembers of our conversations today but in the work we choose to do once we leave outside of this Zoom room.
We hope you will examine where you enter into this conversation so if you can make space for those who are hoping to share their lived experiences in the chat or maybe someone who is asking for help with something they have dealt with that was difficulty or discriminatory in some way but help make space for one another in that way so examine where you enter and what you can do from this point onward.
Sometimes we will attend these Zoom sessions and we are in a laid-back mode and when we talk about disability justice we are talking about things that are actionable, so we are hoping you will be able to do something with this content so where do you enter?
Someone who works in the legal space?
Are you someone who worked in the service industry space, are you someone who provides direct support to individuals with disabilities but who are you?
What can you do within your span of control?
What can you do in terms of your capacity to bring about substantive and sustained change.
Those are the conversations we want to have today, everybody on this line can do something.
We want to honor and give space to that.
We want to recognize that today.
Also we want to make sure that we give people a content warning, we will be discussing things look domestic violence and human trafficking.
We won't go into significant detail but we want to acknowledge those topics do come up today and feel free to mute us or come back at a later time if any of that information is triggering to you or makes you uncomfortable.
We ask that you make collective access for each other so if someone has a question about where they can get a resource, we are constantly giving out book suggestions and talking about websites and authorize as we present, it rolls off the tongue but we are not the only people with good sessions today.
So if you know of good things, throw it in the chat.
If there is a question that you know the answer to, please don't wait for us to give the answer, pop in and say well this works like this in my state or I've had this experience and this is what we've done.
Share that in the chat but let's have a robust discussion today folks.
It's a small enough group where we can engage in an in-depth and robust way.
That's why we kept our slides short, we want to spend the final 30 minutes in deep discussion and in conversation with you all today so let's afford each other the possibility of doing that.
Lastly everything in this deck is ever-evolving.
So if you have good tactics, strategies, suggestions, questions, contributions of any kind, every time we do these workshops we change the content, elevate and evolve it.
Know that nothing here is set in stone.
I'm going to switch it over to Valerie so Beck dive in.
VALERIE NOVACK: Thank you Justice.
I am having a hard time with the Zoom today.
We're going to practice a little bit of what we're talking about today and I will preface this with saying I am definitely experiencing quite a bit of a flare and a bit of brain fog so if you see me looking down it's because I have more notes than I normally do and I might lose my train of thought, I'm having a day where my brain is finicky.
So if you can please bear with me there.
Here we have on the screen as I am sure you are all familiar with here a few of our Disability Rights legislation that we have in the U.S.
Part of the reason that Justice and I are so passionate about Disability justice in emergency management is because we so often here about the importance and necessity of maintaining the civil right for people with disabilities and disasters.
We are going to talk about later the many, many, many ways that we do not see this happen in disaster after disaster and the way that results in death and harm and gross disability.
However, on the other side of this, we also know that there is a whole lot of people outside of and within disaster situations who also are constantly denied their access to their disability rights.
So what ends up happening when we focus like much of our law often does on just securing rights in the frame works that we currently have, we continue to miss a bunch of people who don't have access to those rights.
So we are going to talk about the rights here because we don't want to give the idea that these are unimportant but just talk about where we need to move forward as far as applying Justice so we can make sure we are not stopping at we have codified rights and we have done our job when we know that's not the case and there are a lot of people that our "rights" conversations leave out.
Of course we have the ADA, access and accommodations.
I think this is probably the legislation we hear the most about, particularly when we are talking about emergency management.
I'm going to go through these fast and try not to talk too fast for the interpreters and captioners, though.
This is what we hear a lot about is your shelter accessible, are you separating out people with disabilities, this goes straight into the Section 504 when we are talking about FEMA funds, disaster declarations.
It's easier for us sometimes to make this argument that you—you need to have accessible parking and we need to make sure that we are not separating people from their families.
Those we are more familiar with.
When we start to get to the bottom ones, the Olmstead decision, for example, this is when things start to get murky for people.
We have a ruling that state that people with disabilities should be able to receive services and live inclusive in their communities.
This is a really, really important goal.
However, on the other side of that we have people right now who are living in their communities or in the community without any choice of where to live and we are going to talk more about environmental racism and disability.
We're going to talk about investment in certain neighborhoods and the way those cost and have a life toll often in our disabled people of color, low-income people with disabilities that are living in these neighborhoods that are cast off.
We're seeing this in a real way with COVID ask have been for the last year.
We have IDEA, which is protecting our students.
Now these are students in K-12.
There have been reports out there and we have talked about it in our presentations, Justice and I, but there have been multiple lawsuits and multiple situations where students with disabilities aren't even included in practice drills.
They are ignored or put in certain rooms and said we'll think about you when the disaster comes and then forgotten about.
The point in talking about these is to say, all of these things are law.
These are all currently active requirements of federal governments of places of public accommodation, of schools and higher he had cakes facilities.
Yet we still see an extremely disproportionate intact of death, of financial losses, of housing losses, of food loss for people with disabilities during disasters.
So that says that there is a gap that this rights framework is not hitting, right, for one reason or another.
So what we are going to talk about today is disability justice.
I talked about how that's different from a disability rights framework.
We are talking about bringing a change of culture.
Going beyond just including someone and going to a partnership and an equitable community when we talk about getting people what they need and living within communities and inclusion.
So disability justice was a framework coined by disabled activists, people of color in the Bay Area called Since Invalid, and there are 10 principles that we are going to go over in a minute and later in the presentation Justice is going to talk about how those can be applied to our emergency management procedures.
But this was a group of queer, disabled people of color who looked at their community, looked at the systems we had here and realized that we needed to do more to help each other because rights were leaving people out, particularly people that lived and looked like the people in Since Invalid.
So the ten principles that this group has come up with and has continued to work around and move, they came out with a document at the beginning of COVID to apply this to mutual aid and COVID.
I'm going to read through those with a little bit about them.
We will talk about them in detail later on.
The first one is intersectionality, a trendy word, there are a lot of people who have removed it from its original definition by Dr. Krenshaw and this was originally specifically talking about a specific marginalization of black women experiencing sexism and racism and we have now used it to talk about any nexus of multiple marginalization.
Why this is important is because when we talk about rights and talk about people who are able to access rights we know that whiteness, able-bodiedness, maleness, people who are nonbinary and also disabled and native, right, suddenly that's a lot of marginalization that all of that is being kept away from this rights conversation and those needs are not being addressed.
So realizing that people exist at more than one spot and how do we address their needs holistically.
Leadership by the most impacted.
This is a conference with a lot of us are professionals in what we do.
Many of us may be people of color or disabled but often we are cutting out from our conversations a lot of the people who really have the solutions because they've survived these problems.
They are in it day in and day out and when it comes time to make plans for how to help communities we often like to say because I have the letters behind my name or because I went to school and took a test, what have you, or even just done a lot of research that I have the answers to these problems.
When a lot of times the hardest thing to do is step back and say, you know what, I'm not the expert here.
What do you think we should do?
When we focus on those impacted we are able to create cultural shifts that allow us to use lived experience to make solutions and a lot of times it means we don't have to start from scratch.
Anti-capitalist Politic.
I'm sure the work that you have done you have seen the ways that the profitability of disaster, whether that is, oh, let's build new condos in this neighborhood that has been destroyed, whether it's a multi-billion-dollar school safety industry that we won't address, school mass shootings, there is a lot of money that is made and spent that acts if the way we do emergency management that you could do an entire presentation on that alone.
A lot of those in the middle, commitment to cross-movement organizing, recognizing wholeness, sustainability, these add to the conversation and there is a dichotomy between disability types in COVID, organizations that help people with mobility disability and you have mental health over here and between there we might have what we call serious mental health or chronic mental health issues, right?
The truth is we should all be fighting more access and equity for each other.
That feeds directly into this wholeness and the sustainability.
Many who are disabled kind of going back to that intersectionality are multiply disabled.
I am a person who has a mental illness and a physical disability.
So when we advocate in these silos, where does somebody like me go?
Recognizing the wholeness of somebody as being queer and disabled, right?
Or what have you.
This allows us the sustainability, as I'm sure a lot of you are feeling right now, I know I'm feeling it, I texted Justice this morning and said I don't know if I can do this.
It's hard to do this workday in and day out.
When we build community and partnership it allows me to say, you know what?
I need to take care of my body today and it allows Justice to step in for me because she has the ability to keep this going.
And I know so many of us when we are doing this work, especially if you are doing grass roots work, nonprofit work, it gets tiring and I don't know how many times I've heard people say I just wish I could step back and part of the reason we don't have the ability to do that is because we haven't built in solidarity and sustainability into the work we do.
And interdependence, a big piece of what was originally part of our Disability Rights Movement but we moved away from that to a more independent model and disability justice brings us back to the interdependence of human relationships which is super, super important when we talk about emergency response.
So much of emergency response is hyper local and it's about the community you've built in your mitigation phases.
And in your preparation phases, rather.
So many of those relationships, and these beginning eight principles help to lead us to this collective collaboration and for emergency management specifically, equity in life-saving, life-sustaining and life-supporting measures before, during and after these emergency situations.
Okay. Justice, back to you.
JUSTICE SHORTER: Awesome.
I am a book nerd and I am not ashamed of it so what I want to do is have a collective access moment.
If you are able to provide access for one another throw book recommendations into the chat because Valerie mentioned a few and I wanted to expand on a few of my favorites.
If we can throw Medicine Stories into the chat, again, greatly appreciate it.
Then if we could throw in The Weight of Our Dreams by Lydia Brown, these books are foundational pieces that can give you additional inspiration on how you can move forward in an in-depth way no matter your area of specialty.
So let's break it town.
Disability justice is not the same thing as Disability Rights.
So often they are used interchangeably, because disability justice picks up where Disability Rights leaves off, so when Disability Rights is more legal framework, we have to come to the understanding that not everyone can access the legal system in the same way nor is it equitable for everyone who tries to access it.
We must also recognize the historical implications of trying to interact with a system that has habitually caused harm, death, devastation, all types of difficult and really traumatic and tragic impacts on people of color with disabilities, right?
We want to uplift those histories and acknowledge those experiences because it very much explains and helps us to unpack why people choose to report things, why people choose to engage with the legal systems in the way they do so I want to acknowledge that for folks.
We know that the legal system can be protracted.
Many of you on the line might be lawyers yourselves and so these things take time and maybe not everyone has the time to engage in a process in such a way.
Justice looks different for different people and sometimes justice looks like a college education or additional resources or food programs in the neighborhood, justice may look like community responders who are not accompanied by police officer.
Justice might look like additional fund be for domestic violence survivors, so justice can look different for different people and I want to expand our thinking around this as what we think about disability justice can look like for people in a disaster context.
When we do that it helps us to understand the measures, the metrics of success are different than what officials may deem as successful, right?
So whereas someone looking at a spreadsheet in an abstract way may say this is success because we have had X amount of people return to their community so now we've been successful, or they may say we have been able to get these primary buildings repaired so this community has recovered.
You may have the people who live in those communities saying we have not successfully recovered until the dialysis clinic is back so my grandmother doesn't have to go 20 miles out in order to get her treatment three times a week.
Someone may say we have not successfully recovered until my church is back because a lot of people who are houseless are able to eat via the church in a community, so we are not successful until we all have what we need.
We want to acknowledge those perspectives because justice can look like different things in success and recovery in a disaster.
We want to acknowledge that there are multiple tools and tactics that can be used so, again, as we think about disability rights, we think about this in terms of dismantling discriminatory systems so dismantling the frame works and as we talk about disability justice we talk about bridging and building beyond those systems, and that is a creative space to be in.
It's a collective space, a community-driven space and a space that makes as much room as needed and say necessary for us to show up in our different bodies and minds and our body minds combined in terms of what we can do before, during and after disasters.
That's the way we're talking about applying it today.
We want to start off there before we move forward.
So thank you for that.
We talked about harm.
Valerie can you confirm that's the slide you see?
VALERIE NOVACK: That's it.
JUSTICE SHORTER: I did not mention it at the beginning, folks, but I am blind and I have a different set-up on my computer and so occasionally you will hear me talk with Valerie that what I'm seeing is what you're seeing.
I will be going and people are like, that's not on the screen N all right, so a few causes of harm.
We want to think about this in terms of policing, prison, and surveillance, we can talk about 9/11, a major emergency event that happened in our country but who ended up getting surveilled after that, a lot of brown folks, Muslim folks who had to deal with excess active monitoring and surveillance after 9/11.
So we need to think about what that means in terms of are these people going to be excited and wholly invested in working with those same institutions and entities now moving forward for different types of emergencies.
It's important to understand where people come from, understanding background so we can decide how we can best move forward with engaging those groups here on out, right?
So I have spoken to so many fire fighters and first responders and EMT folks, people with disabilities don't want to engage, I've tried to reach out to them, they don't respond to my emails, they haven't gotten back to me and my response is always who came before you?
What did they do?
What were the impacts of what happened?
Right?
And are people still dealing with the residual impacts today although it's 10, 15, 20 years later, right?
So that impacts whether or not someone wants to engage with you today.
So recognizing that is very important if we're talking about how we're going to do this work if a substantive way.
So I want to know who gets surveilled, criminalized, scapegoated and policed throughout emergency cycles.
This is important because we think about this in terms of individuals who are classified as looters, and individuals who are categorized as "looking for supplies" after a disaster event.
We know that from Hurricane Katrina, and we see this in communities of color and the media frames are starting to change but those frames were explicit and offensive.
Thugs and people are looting and taking advantage of a terrible situation.
The way that people were framed, right, so people who needed water, people who needed food after Hurricane Katrina, people were killed for trying to cross into safer areas after the hurricane, these are not high perpendicular bowl these are facts and can be found and looked up.
This is what we mean about people trying to gain access to the resources they need.
When we deal with this implicit bias, how people with disabilities are viewed and how people of color are viewed and people of color with disabilities are viewed after disasters and this is important, an important conversation to have especially if we are treated as disposable or expendable so it's important for us, we need to understand the frames so we can dig in deep is try to find solutions that get at the roots not just at the leaves.
We want to acknowledge gas lighting and discrimination and that can happen from government representatives, case managers, voluntary organizations, this is so interesting because sometimes people with disabilities, I've been in shelters and part of multi-agency task forces and I've been, you know, talked to by other folks who were with me who were providing supports and services.
They would not so much believe the person with the disability that was conveying their story, I don't know if she is telling the truth and I don't know if this is—they don't look like this is what happened.
They're showing signs that they may not be an honest person.
Don't get me wrong, no one is saying that people with disabilities are not without the same characteristics that you will find in any person so you may have people with any type of motive, this is true.
But the lack of disability competency, the failure to believing people when they are sharing their stories, the constant digging for information that is not at all even necessary in order to obtain services and supports I've had folks ask people with disabilities for their disability origin story as if that had any relevance for somebody asking for assistance today.
All they need to know is whether that person had a disability or obtained a disability or if they can focus on the need as opposed to the disability.
We know that not all people identify with the word disability which can be stigma tying in communities as well.
So it's important to acknowledge those experiences, the government representative had a badge on their chest and this individual with a disability thought they had to, they were required to share a painful story just to get access to maybe a $100 gift card or maybe some additional services or supports that they had to convey that, I was beaten by my husband with a tire iron and that's why I have a traumatic brain injury now or I was a soldier in the war and that's why I have this disability now, and the fact that people didn't know that that question was not on the form that the government representative was filling out.
We ask people to think about this because it keeps people away.
You talk about inclusion we want to bring you in not exclude you even more so that's the purpose of acknowledging me today.
Let me keep on going.
We talk domestic violence, gender-based violence, economic explore advertising and fraud as it relates to older folks with disabilities and how predatory individuals will seek out older adults or anyone with a disability, actually, after disasters, in terms of repairs and recovery and pretending to be government officials, that can be traumatic, right?
We think about abuse and neglect by organizations or individuals who are providing resources, activities, and daily living skills training.
This is important because the very organizations that you reach out to, that you ask for help that you ask for assistance can be the same that are perpetuating the harm that you are trying to distance yourself from.
Are you experiencing sexual harassment from the organization that you need to get services from?
Are the staff members there harassing you sexual?
Are they touching you in ways that you shouldn't be touched.
Have you tried to report this information and were not listened to so you're not going to the place in your community that you would traditionally go to and that everybody keeps directing you to because that organization is perhaps a perpetrator of harm and in a cyclical process of denying people access to supports and services they need in order to fully recover.
These things are important to think about.
Also exclusion in management, intentional divestment in mitt takings and sustainable infrastructure within communities of color and not putting money into the electrical grid in different parts of Texas, right?
Or thinking about this, putting money in certain affluent areas and be not putting the same resources in Jackson, Mississippi, those are conversations that we want to have.
We want to think about this in terms of rural areas as well.
I was on a call and someone said the nearest person for me is five miles away.
I have to take care of me and my kids and if anything happens with my car I am completely without support.
So what does this mean for this person for emergency evacuations and when they are trying to get out.
This is what I mean when I talk about solidarity with one another because it's not government representatives checking on that woman and her kids, it's her family and friends, so we will talk about mutual aid in a bit.
Then we have medical ableism and racism and we will get into those more.
One thing they'll say before I toss it to Valerie is that disability justice is applicable in a crisis.
So we think about this in terms of slow onset crises versus events.
If you are dealing with poverty, the question of whether or not you are able to get back and forth to work and you miss a day at your job you are not able to make rent and then you will get kicked out and evicted because your landlord has refused to give you leeway if you are dealing with those then you are far less capable to deal with emergency disaster, it's a lot to bear.
It's not saying it cannot be done, people do it, we have managed to survive this so far but it means this is difficult ask it puts you in a position of being less capable of preparing in a way that are constantly recommend, these seven-day go bags and let's make sure your car has stuff and multiple days of food it takes money to do that.
Right?
So they often call that the purchasing aspect of preparedness, purchase preparedness, the ability to purchase all these things in order to be prepared for what happens when you can't purchase it?
The onus is often put on the individual, the personal responsibility.
What then happens when you don't have purchasing power in that way?
We talk about this when we talk about anticapitalist politic and equal Justice as well.
So we want to think about that in terms of syndemic, right?
These are simultaneous and synergistic epidemics that develop under health despair its, caused by poverty and stress and structural violence.
It's the recognition that these things are deeply connected to poverty and stress and structural violence, right?
People like to talk about these and categorize them, when they all affect everyone and intertwine and intersectionality is the understanding of compounded firms of discrimination, implicit bias and marginalization.
We can talk about this and the physiological impacts of disasters on people and having to deal people.
This is directly connected to the stress and strain of having to deal with racism and implicit bias on a daily basis and what that does the to the body because we acknowledge the body-mind needs, and we recognize wholeness.
We think about that in terms of what we hear so often, be ready.
Readiness, resilience, and what does that mean.
We have to think about the impact that every day social conditions have on our bodies and what that means when you have been weathered for so long and how you can deal with a pandemic when it hits and the conditions that are considered to be underlying conditions and co-morbidities, and how that is attributable or connected to overarching issues.
Weapon to make the connection for folks because they're connected or talked about in these wholly separate spheres.
The last thing they'll say here is around the sand paper versus the baseball bat and this is an analogy that comes from a lot of folks who work in psychology and who work around trauma.
I loved it so I picked it up when we talked about collective trauma because the sand paper is things that happen over time, gradually grating on you, constantly wearing you down over time and the baseball bat is something that's more acute.
It hits you out of nowhere that's far more difficult to deal with and it knocks the wind out of you.
We think about that when we talk about collective trauma and when we put communities into a better position to support one another and deal with disaster and how can we support community-led and driven responses and preparedness, mitigation response, recovery overall.
Valerie?
VALERIE NOVACK: Thank you.
We're going to talk now about some of those slow onset examples.
I'm going to throw out a little bit of statistic-type information kind of like Justice said.
I go back and forth about this but I know that numbers speak so just know that when we talk about statistical numbers a lot of times for the exact same reasons that we need, justice-based approaches, a lot of people are not included in these numbers.
A lot of things are missed.
But also we live in a world where dollars and unfortunately sometimes body counts are what speaks to people.
So we're going to talk about this with numbers and I like to give that caveat knowing that so many times, one, people are not just numbers, right?
But also those are the things that speak.
I'm also going to apologize I tried to take more medicine but my speech is being affected right now.
So this has happened to me two other times it's a nightmare but I'm going to try to go through it as best I can.
I did wanting to back to one point that Justice made that I'm seeing during COVID and vaccine conversations.
I want to talk about some of the looking forward, some of the ramifications of past and current behaviors.
When we talk about surveillance and Justice mentioned police surveillance and I know some of you because you do disability work you might be familiar with the electronic verification surveillance but I'm going to challenge you also as people who are doing legal work or social work, emergency management work to think about your own personal surveillance.
This is something that's always been around but I'm seeing it pop up more in connection with to gas lighting with COVID and vaccines.
Whether or not you mean to you watch people.
Who do you watch, why, and what conclusions are you putting into your work based on that?
I'm seeing this because, for example, I will use myself.
The way that I'm feeling right now, sitting at my kitchen counter I can tell you 99.9% that if I were to get up and try to walk right now I would fall.
I'm shaky, when I get off of here my husband will have to help me because I don't have any cane next to me.
Two days ago I ran five miles.
So if I were to put on my Facebook page or Twitter, hey, you know, I just did this race on Friday and I ran five miles and then a disaster hit today and I told you I can't get to my car to evacuate, there is a very real situation in which a person might say, well, I know that's not true because you just went running yesterday.
So I really just want to point that out.
I've seen this when people have said that they are at high risk and need the COVID vaccine, individual people coming out and being like, oh, well I know that you can do this or you must not be that disabled because I've seen you do XYZ.
Because we had time and because I'm waiting for my medicine to kick in I thought I would throw out that example.
It's not only the police that are gate keeping access based off opinions that have been conceived or off framework that they are told to mark XYZ.
I just wanted to throw that out there.
As far as environmental inequities we are going to talk about environmental racism and the reason this becomes so important and integral to the justice and emergency management situation is because of how inequitable and unjust globally and we are going to talk about the U.S. as well our environmental situations are and how that one exacerbates disability and disaster but then on the post disaster side.
It ends up increasing the amount of death and disability we see because of our lack of equitable mitigation and preparation pre-disaster.
So mold, vermin, lead, and if you have not been part of our lead conversation, I'm not sure where you've been.
Flint is not the only situation but it's the most visible to people here in the U.S.
The lead paint and lead exposure problem for our young people, for our children, there are I saw an article last year talking about kids starting kindergarten who had lived their whole lives in Flint, Michigan having exposed water.
We know things like lead in water can cause strokes and learning disabilities.
So what are we talking about when we start to talk about rights-based approaches to things like disability that we don't fund, that we don't support, that we are constantly having to protect.
At the same time we are raising children in homes that are creating disability for them, right?
There is a natural tension there ask we see this over and over and over again.
The next point on the slide and I'm sorry I did not do image descriptions but this slide has blood cells, air pollution, industrial piping, just kind of some different industrial things.
The next point we have on here is air pollution.
You may or may not be aware of this but air pollution takes what they call premature deaths.
So there are measurements on certain disability types or certain illnesses and how they affect your life expectancy rate.
We lose about 7 million people prematurely as they say globally specifically because of air pollution.
In the U.S. the amount of kids and adults who develop respiratory diseases, things like asthma, life-long disability because of the toxins that we put into the air, it is one of the top disability creators in the world and we don't talk about it all that of often as far as an emergency management problem.
Air quality is massive in particularly low-income communities of poor health outcomes which we see exacerbated when we have situations like a pandemic that we're seeing now.
Toxic dump sites, one of those evident in the past and now we don't talk about it so much.
We have a county in Alabama that for a handful of years had almost 50% of our nation's not just their state but the nation's toxic waste dumped in a neighborhood that was 90% black.
They call it cancer alley now and a lot of those people still don't get healthcare even though these are things that we as a nation have done to these neighborhoods.
So when we are talking about that we're not talking about things that necessarily may have been illegal at the time.
This is, again, where we get tension between justice and rights.
You could easily say they can move at any time but I think all of us know that things aren't really that simple.
I'm going to go through these faster.
Polluted water, the county that I mentioned in Alabama, Sumpter some of these toxic waste sites are right next to their water filtration facilities.
These with weaved in problems that we talk about, oil pipelines we saw on the news protesters being hosed down and arrested for pipelines that less than a decade later ruined lands, right?
Lack of green space.
I just read an article yesterday that was talking about a study where they did a focus group with a group of disability people in various age frames and found that lack of access to open green space seemed to affect their quality of life and how much they enjoyed life as much as having access to transportation, but how many times do people have to live in certain areas because we don't have infrastructure to get them to school or to the grocery store, to get them to doctors’ appointments.
And then, of course, factory
Emissions.
And these are the same people that we give titles of vulnerable populations, as if that's something innate in them and not a situation we have created with our legal and economic and housing development in the way that we have.
A real example of this, I think Justice mentioned this earlier but part of the flooding that happened in Houston can be linked back to removal of open space that used to help flooding for parking lots.
One of the low income, lower income areas that was flooded really bad that was never supposed to flood in a 100-year flood did because of infrastructure that was built in a wealthier neighborhood, right?
So these are outcomes that are very much policy outcomes.
They're outcomes because we—you know, people who are in these spaces have made decisions before these disasters happened that negatively situated entire neighborhoods, entire groups of people.
A lot of times for the benefit of another group of people.
Right?
Then when something like a California Campfire happens and we come back with numbers that say 70% of the people who have died are people with disabilities we all scratch our heads and hold conferences and say what went wrong?
But our systems were not built to protect these people and that's why disability justice needs to be a shift in the way that we practice.
Over to Justice.
JUSTICE SHORTER: Nice and I will pick up on a thread that Valerie mentioned and I wanted to acknowledge the lack of potable water on indigenous lands.
Folks were concerned about hygiene, they were saying, there are a lot of places on indigenous lands don't have access to water, what does this mean for washing our hands multiple times a day so we understand the COVID, the long-haul effects of COVID means that there will be tons and tons of people who have new disabilities as a result of COVID and we have to think about the people with disabilities who had those disabilities prior to COVID having access to water and resources that they need.
I wanted to acknowledge the demolition and the construction of properties within communities of color as well.
I heard a story recently coming out of St. Louis where there were two black women working on a community garden and they were excited about it, and what they noticed and were concerned about was soil contamination because there was an effort underway by the city to demolish hazardous properties in the community but they were concerned about the construction company and the way that they were disposing the degree and the waste, they were burning them and all those pollutants in the air, they didn't think they were diluting those chemicals before they burned them so they were concerned about the soil quality at that point.
So you talk about a community who is trying to take health and access the fruits and vegetables Valerie mentioned, food swamps and deserts and trying to take that into their own hands and being thwarted by competing interests of trying to remove dangerous properties in a way that causes additional harm to the communities, as well.
All of these are different frames.
When we do these workshops we try to throw in as many perspectives as possible to expand the way folks are thinking about these issues.
We say we want to deepen and expand.
If we can go deeper we want to get you there and if we can expand thoughts on different perspectives we try to do that to give you as many options as possible when you are deciding for yourselves what is your best way of engaging on these issues moving forward.
Right now we are looking at a slight that talked about emergency management systems, because we want to focus on systems change.
We don't want to think about emergency management in a flippant way, well you should prepare and if you don't then you will be left behind and that is the default attitude.
It perhaps isn't said in such harsh terms but it is what we are left with in terms of how people of color with disabilities are treated.
So you think about emergency management offices or decisions or departments they are the center of connection in disasters and they have the acumen and the expertise around the emergency management cycle like these offices know how to deal with a crisis, that's their entire purpose of being.
They are legally required to make sure that they include people with disabilities thought all phases of emergency management right, before, during, after disasters.
Yet and still they may or may not have a designated person or disability inclusion or to work with folks with access and functional needs, they may or may not consistently engage a diverse group of stakeholders, they may or may not allocate funding for accommodations and access needs.
Right?
So all of these things are things that we like to turn to because it's one thing to say that we will do this work in theory.
It's one thing to put it in a policy.
It is an entirely different thing to bring that down to the level of practice, right?
We know that funding needs to be there to put it in practice.
We know that the staff people need to be there who have the competency to put it into practice.
We know that the community needs to be there to put it into practice.
That's what we mean by are there people who are in place that have this competency, level of background and connection and commitment to doing this work?
Are they in place?
We talk about the most impacted are they black, indigenous, Latin X Asian folks with disabilities that are represented as part of your staff or are they casually considered when it's convenient.
After the plans are drawn up and the money is divided then do we go to these communities and say this is what we have to work with, now what are your thoughts?
We have made the decision but we do want to talk to you at this point.
Are people brought in in that way or in a more substantive way, are they part of the process all the way through in a thorough way?
That's what we mean.
How are you engaging communities moving forward?
How are you making sure they are a part of not only the conversations but they are part of the decisions.
This is the thing that I have to stop on sometimes because the narratives are powerful.
The narratives are what help us to learn, understand, unpack, unfold a lot of these deeply complex issues.
We have to understand that sometimes people only see us as story tellers.
It's extract active, right?
We want to get your input but they don't see us as decision makers and therein lies the problem, right?
We want to understand—not just storytellers, although that's a powerful position to hold and we know the history in our communities and backgrounds so that's a tradition to up hold and honor but we want to recognize that there must be something done to honor the capacity to be decision makers in this sense as well.
Leadership by the most impacted, Rashd Robinson says "presence is not power" so representation matters, yes, it's important for us to be in the room but we want to make sure that folks have the power to be able to make the decisions that need to be made that are directly and intimately connected to their everyday lives and their ability to thrive in an emergency, right?
We want to acknowledge that sometimes emergency management systems may have a harmful history in certain communities and I talked about this earlier saying what happened before, you know, in previous disasters, can we think about this?
I was just speaking to Valerie about this earlier this week and there is such a huge emphasis on scenario planning, thinking about the hypothetical, what would happen with this, with that?
We need to have the strategic forecasting, right?
That's a wonderful activity and it's very effective but what I would like to add or contribute to that is that the hypothetical need to be paired with the historical.
Often you can just look back and see what happened to determine what would happen in the future or in the present if this same emergency event happened and nothing has changed.
Why would I think anything would be different?
There has been no more investment in these communities, nothing changed in the infrastructure, no pathways have been created, I don't need a hypothetical, I can tell you my every day lived reality.
So we have to pair the hypothetical with the historical and if it hasn't happened in your community what are other communities that have faced similar conditions?
Are there those that are similar to yours in a geographic sense or in an economic sense or in terms of demographics but can we look to Puerto Rico, New Orleans, Flint, Houston, Jackson, other places across the country?
A place to say we are dealing with similar resource restrictions, and how can that influence what we are now planning to do moving forward.
I'm not saying to totally throw out the concept of scenario planning, I think it's a valuable tool but I think it has to be paired with the historical lens and thinking about the things that have happened to communities throughout time and not just saying that was potential let's move on and figure out what's going to be great in terms of how we maneuver in the future, right?
So we have to recognize the past in order to prepare ourselves for the present and the future.
Then I want to acknowledge that sometimes emergency management systems are also connected to law enforcement systems.
So you think about police officers, National Guard members who are deployed during protests, uprisings as well as emergency evacuations, right?
This is important because you have mechanisms that people are promoting or have promoted in the past such as registries.
One of the reasons why people with disabilities have been on the fence or outright opposed to these registries and registries by the way are really a long list of people with disabilities you register and in case there is an emergency they will have you on the list, have your address on the list, have your disability type on the list, all that information will be readily available to you.
When I go out to do workshops and speak to first responders, EMT folks, when I speak to them they will mention these registries as a prime idea and I often say to them if I am a black woman with a disability I don't want to be on that.
I am! I am a black woman with a disability.
I don't necessarily want to be on that list, right?
Because I know that that list won't only be shared with fire fighters or EMTs, but it will be shared with police officers, people who I may not want to have access to that information because of interactions in my particular community.
So it's important to understand why or why not people choose to engage in those efforts that are built to assist people with disabilities in some way.
Right?
I think this is also interesting because emergency fire fighters will say maybe you can put something in the window or if you put your name on this list at the very least we will know where you are and that is a bit condescending in the sense that we presume people with disabilities are always going to be at home.
You may catch me in a club, not pre-COVID, now, but pre-COVID you may catch me at the Brown Sugar Festival, you will catch me in different places, out roaming around my neighborhood, for instance.
But there are you a number of people with disabilities who are at home and that is entirely fine and recognizing COVID here but it's understanding the multi-faceted nature of the lives we live.
We live multidimensional lives as well right?
So the idea that people with disabilities are not interacting with their community is problematic so we need to plan for people with disabilities to be in any setting, can certificates, at malls if there is a domestic terror event at grocery stores so we don't want to plan for the whole population in the event of a domestic terror attack with a shooter but we're going to presume nobody with a disability is going to be at these places, why, right?
Why would they be at a bar, at a grocery store, anyplace else, right?
We are talking about local folks, things that individual businesses do in terms of how they plan for emergencies, things that emergency responders and police officers do as it relates to emergency management and then of course the ways that emergency management departments who are the folks tasked with these responsibilities are doing as it relates to issues overall so we are connecting the dots as we go.
So we want to acknowledge that disability justice has inextricable links to other justice-based movements so emergency and crisis management requires disability justice.
You can't talk about resilience or recovery or response without talking about the folks who are impacted and niece those the most.
There was a community in Puerto Rico that resisted the idea of resilience because it was being used as a way to shift responsibility on to the community in terms of resourcing them with what they needed, the emphasis was kind of removed from that, which is where it should have been then kind of just—they're just so resilient I guess there isn't as much of a need to make sure they have the money to recover and rebuild and repair.
Look at how innovative her and the creativity and those things are beautiful to be sure, don't get me wrong.
But we have to acknowledge that sometimes these frames, those ways of thinking is a direct way of trying to shoulder or push off responsibility on to the individuals and not look at this in terms of systems change, right?
So we don't want the onus to be thrown on to individuals under the guise we are so glad you are creative and resilient.
We talk about climate and environmental justice in terms of being a part of communities and interacting and engaging in our own lives and what does that mean in terms of the land we live on and the communities we live in the environment that we are a part of, how can we sustain ourselves in those ways.
We need to look at that through a disability justice perspective, transformative justice requires disability just and as collective liberation, we have talked about policing and prisons and surveillance and I wanted to mention prisons in terms of how we prepare for individuals who are incarcerated during disasters, there has been a whole issue and many of you have seen the numbers and stories on this about the proliferation of COVID-19 in jails and problems throughout this country.
We have to think about how are we preparing for individual who are in prison when we think about disaster preparedness and how we think about crisis management, whether that be a health crisis or some other sort of weather-related event, right?
There are stories about people who have been left inside their cells while water is rushing in because they have been abandoned by the guards and only later rescued and provided with water and additional supports.
We need to think about these issues because it's not just people outside of those settings but people who are within those areas as well we want to be mindful of.
That's what we mean when we talk about collective liberation.
Healing Justice requires disability justice, just for LGBTQ folks requires disability justice when we talk about cross-movement organizing I identify as a black, blind, lesbian woman and I am all those things simultaneously so I want to figure out how I can move in different spaces that get at those issues in a more intersectional way and I think about that in terms of cross movement organizing, and economic Justice when we talk about anticapitalist politic, we want to get rid of those harmful ways of thinking about a person's worth, you have worth whether or not you are able to produce something, right?
You should be able to live and have your material needs should be able to be met, right?
So we think about that after disasters in terms of how people have the things that they need in order to recover.
Recover doesn't just happen out of nowhere.
You need to have your material needs met, you need water, food, shelter, your medical equipment, right, your medications.
You need ways of communicating, all of those are important to think through.
Then we think about educational justice and that requires disability justice and through collective access and Valerie talked about this if we want to provide an example we can think about students with disabilities and how much advocates had to really push and fight to make sure she received an equitable education throughout the pandemic, many of whom are still not receiving equitable education in terms of everything going visit with an and the thought process by school districts we can get everybody else up and going and we will deal with those kids later and I know some of you on this line have probably been part of those pushes to make sure kids with disabilities were not left behind.
Think about this, we're in a crisis right now.
Think about what that means for those students.
I'm going to switch back over to Valerie.
VALERIE NOVACK: Thank you.
So there is—we're going to touch a little bit on some ways to move forward to lead us into a conversation here.
I'm going to address one of the comments, I think it was TL who put it in the chat since Justice brought up registry ask we will talk about things that don't work so well and then switch to system changes.
We get this question a lot because you so often hear about, like Justice said, constantly being, we thought of this great idea, let's do a registry.
It's not only emergency management, I think I hear about it there more than anything else but there are—I've seen registries for—so cops know that a driver has a disability.
I've seen registries about students with disabilities.
It comes up all the time in so many field of let's make this list of all these people with disabilities and that's going to somehow be our solution to these access problems.
I don't usually like to use sweeping statements but I don't think I've ever seen this work.
I don't like to say "never" but I don't think I've ever seen it work.
I think Justice said it comes in in K-12 a lot.
In fact, it's—so an example, we saw this related to emergency management.
Shortly after the shooting in Florida, almost immediately after, they decided to make changes to the school system and wanted to and I believe did pass but I haven't looked at it in a while a rule for registering kid tore school the next year that if they had been required to see a mental health professional that they—the parents had to notify the school at the beginning of the school year when they registered and these students would be put on a list because they were going to be considered, you know, potentially—likely or with a history of something that could suggest that they might cause harm to students at school.
My first thought was, if I was 15 and just went through something like a school shooting I would hope somebody would require me to go see a therapist, and then how egregious would I feel when I went to register for school oh because you saw a therapist now we're going to watch you, put your name on this list.
Maria Town talked about being in Houston when Harvey hit and she speaks to registries, and there were maybe six people on the list.
You may register because you were on a website or you updated your ID, and then never again but we know people move on a regular basis, particularly if maybe you're somebody who is financially burdened.
Who is maybe houseless, is not renting, right?
We know these situations happen.
If you're not constantly updating your phone number, not constantly updating your address people aren't going to find you anyway.
But then there is the other side of this where we also seem to forget that when a disaster situation hits it generally hits a region.
For example, one of the things that is clear and I think we might have seen pictures as an example of this, there are pictures of all the abandoned transit buses after Katrina hit because there was no one there to drive them because everybody had to leave.
When I was volunteering to help with hurricane Irma I got a call from a disabled man who said he did not evacuate with his family because he had signed up for his county's list, and they had promised if you were on this list someone would come and pick you up in an accessible van and help you evacuate.
When I was talking to him, Irma had already hit, he could not get out, no one ever showed up.
So he turned down an option to get himself out safely because he thought his county would be taking care of him and they never showed up.
This happens all the time.
Not only is it something a lot of people feel safe doing for a million and one reasons but if we are not successful, if we are unsuccessful in our regional planning for emergency management, the idea that then we will be more successful on a specific plan to address a specific population that we're not even addressing in our general plan, just doesn't logically make sense, right?
If you are part of a coalition or an EMA, an emergency management team that is looking at solutions and you know you have a gap in your general plan for people with disabilities, you're probably better off looking at figuring out how to fix that rather than saying as long as we have a list of who these people are I'm sure we can do better because your better doesn't even exist yet if that makes sense and for a lot of reasons that Justice mentioned and that are in the chat.
It's going to miss a lot of people who are not going to update, are not going to want to be on a list, understandably or who are not going to be going to the places if they don't have a driver's license and that's the place you are asking people for this information and any disabled person who doesn't have a driver's license you are going to miss.
So there are a lot of holes and it creates a sense of safety for people who are relying on you to be able to provide support and then if and when that fails, those people are then in a worse situation.
So that's a "no" on registries there, they just don't work.
If that's the only solution that you can come up with it might be indicative of the fact that you're not having these people at the table and as leader in those conversations.
Some of the things we can do?
This first part is huge, recognition of histories of harm.
One of the things that I try to talk about is that as much as we need to have these conversations, all of us together in a situation like this, often disasters are hyper local.
They are a hurricane or tornado or snowstorm or lack of water, something like that that hits a specific region.
One of the biggest ways that you can support your community I think if you are a first responder, if you are somebody who is in the emergency management system is to be involved with your community.
As Justice said that is hard to do full not first acknowledge where that has failed.
Whether or not it's you, whether it was the people that came before you, nobody likes to say it's painful to say I was wrong, I screwed up, I did the wrong thing, but we know we have documented history that that is the place that we have to start from.
It's just—it's there, right?
So we have to start from this place.
Now what's great, though, about justice-based approaches is this focus on transformative change.
This is really hard because we are in a culture that is really obsessed with punishment.
We really, really want people to pay in visceral way for hurting us but that's causing more hurt, right?
So part of this presentation while it might seem, I don't know, idealistic, we have enough history at this point to know what we are doing doesn't work.
So it's time to get a little bit idealistic.
It's time to start thinking about what are the things that can—that are different from the ways we have been doing things before.
So as Justice mentioned for a lot of people, if you've lost your house because of an emergency situation, a disaster situation, you don't get shelter because somebody else got punished by going to jail because of defrauding you for your house, for example, right?
That doesn't get you sheltered, that does nothing for the person who was harm in that situation.
So when we talk about showing up and saying hey I'm a professional who does this, I know we have a bad history here, how can I help you moving forward and then being open to ideas that fit and transform the way that you have historically done things.
That's going to take time and it's baby steps.
But without acknowledging the failure you are going to have the same outcomes we have already had.
So the next point, what is being negotiated, changed, sustained?
You will not answer this question without going to the communities that have survived this and also the same for those who have decided the metrics of success.
I'm going to go fast here but I think COVID is a strong example of this.
I think we can probably all agree that the U.S. could have done a significantly better job in its response.
A lot of people have survived and got what they needed because of mutual aid networks in the last year.
That is community responding to community in a way that helped them.
Regardless of what the surrounding social expectations are, right?
But that also means it's the people that you're helping that are able to determine whether or not you've been successful.
A lot of times when you are on the business kind of end of this, the professional end of this, we're gauging success whether or not—based on whether or not we have checked the boxes on a procedure that we have.
Whether or not we have had an outcome that we have determined before the situation has happened is correct.
And not based on whether or not the people that we're supposed to be serving were served successfully.
Making sure that we adjust our outcome expectation to not just be something that looks good on paper allows us to sort of remember because it's really—and I'm just as guilty of this it's easy to forget when we talk about this stuff, when we go to these trainings that this isn't hypothetical.
These aren't simulated lives on a computer or in a tabletop exercise.
And because of that, our metrics of success can't just be a formula that we spit out and said okay if this is our split we're good.
These are people's lives that we're talking about.
So that should be what we're measuring on.
If we have a disproportion nature number of people who are losing life, who are being harmed, because of what we deem success, then we need to start talking about what our definition of success is.
I will leave it at that so we can have a bit of conversation.
Justice, did you want to add anything?
JUSTICE SHORTER: Throw in the chat specific questions, and I wanted to acknowledge one point that you mentioned, Valerie, I wanted to acknowledge the transgender folks with disabilities and the administrative barriers around affects and not having a gender-affirming ID can put people out of direct connection with the services or supports they need.
Think about this for a moment, you have to show an ID for nearly everything and if you don't have the proper paperwork and this is true for folks who don't have proof of residency and are undocumented and all of these barriers that can keep people from registering for an application for FEMA or registering to get funding from their state recovery fund right so a lot of these things are pretty important when we talk about that, too, the barriers are vast and immense and I wanted to look at them from a nuanced perspective in terms of many different things.
If you have questions, let us know, if you have comments or things that you would like to share, go ahead and bring yourself off mute and do that.
Please say your name or raise your hand and we will call on you, Valerie can see the list or throw it in the chat if you have it.
VALERIE NOVACK: I don't know if I can see—I don't know if it covers up the screen or not if I—I'm not seeing anything in the chat so far.
I'm going to give it a minute and see if we have any questions.
JUSTICE SHORTER: I hope that means we are thorough.
SPEAKER: You guys are really good.
I don't see any hands raised either.
JUSTICE SHORTER: Good, good, good, hopefully that means that—Valerie and I have done variations of this presentation countless times, I'm sure I could count them but I don't want to.
We have done it a lot of times and we change the deck every single time and every time we learn something new we try to incorporate it into the work that we are doing.
If you have additional perspectives or things that you would like to add to this moving forward, strategies, suggestions, tactics, experiences, please let us know.
I saw book recommendations in the chat, anybody want to come off mute and make a comment?
VALERIE NOVACK: I think Nancy is wanting to ask a.
NANCY: I am.
I can put myself in the view if you want me to.
JUSTICE SHORTER: We can hear you good.
NANCY: Okay, I put my video up, I don't know if that matters.
I'm a video for the Red Cross.
I do two parts.
I'm in the disaster—I'm sorry the disability integration group for my region and also I'm involved with the DAC program, the ones that handle fires that happen at night and they give people debit cards and stuff like that.
Has anybody been working with these group to make sure—the kind of training you just gave would be helpful for people who run shelters and the DAT responders because they want to respond to as—I said the single-family fires or apartment fires and it would help if they were able to get—to have the information that you're providing here.
So then they would have some idea what they're working with, has anybody thought about working with that crowd?
It's not just the shelter managers which is what you mentioned earlier but also people that respond to the fires every day.
And they have to figure out how much money to give these people in debit cards.
Has anybody thought about that?
JUSTICE SHORTER: For the sake of time we will answer that, I know Sherry Meyer who runs the disability integration program at Red Cross we have been in conversations with them but no we haven't done a workshop, Valerie we may need to circle back on that and we'll tell them the people are demanding it and we'll cite you, Nancy, and it's the person.
NANCY: I'm not a person with a disability but I do work with people who work with people with disabilities which is why I attended this session.
I want to make sure that we are sharing information and as I said a lot of people talk about shelter stuff but the DAT people—and it's nationwide.
I just work with my region so I only work with 25 or 30 of them.
But they're always wanting to know how do we work with this issue, and they do have a pet auxiliary where they put pets—they have been trained by people that have shelters for pets but I don't know if they have stuff about how to handle—
JUSTICE SHORTER: We can—
NANCY: And they would love to do the right thing they just want to know what it is they can do and how they can do it.
JUSTICE SHORTER: Thank you, Nancy, we will follow back up on that, have and I know the folks who one those and we have not had the chance to secretary.
We have invited Red Cross folks to presentations like this.
I think I see Dustin's hand up, did you want to come off mute.
SPEAKER: First, thank you both for this presentation and Jen for offering support.
I'm thinking about do you have any recommendations for like on the front end of disasters to ensure that people don't get trafficked into nursing facilities and institutions.
The one that registered with me is after Katrina people were incentivized to go to Idaho or Colorado and put into institutions because FEMA or whatever the emergency management agency is in the state kinda just throws their hands up as far as home and community-based services.
I know in Pennsylvania we have tried to integrate that to no avail.
I'm wondering if there are recommendations y'all have.
JUSTICE SHORTER: Valerie?
VALERIE NOVACK: I think when we first started doing this presentation we talked more about that because it is a huge issue.
Not only is there the incentivizing of funneling people into nursing homes but when sandy happened they lost 4,000 people that were in adult facilities and nursing homes trying to move them from one to another.
It's bad.
We happen in Carolina there were two people who were being transferred from a facility who drowned.
The facility thing is—and then COVID, it's bad.
As far as—I think where you are, you've probably work with several folks working on legislative stuff.
A lot of times one of the things that we are doing and trying to do on the preparedness side is the funding structure and support for home and community-based services part of it.
When you are using like a home health aide and then we have something like COVID where your home health aide can't be there, and we have an under funding there, that crates a Domino effect that makes it easy for medical professionals to make it seem like that's where you need to be is in an institution.
The other part of that is if we are in—one of the things that ends up happening is we see this a lot with unsheltered people but if they don't have a place to go home getting funneled to hospitals which then get funneled into nursing homes as well so I think a big part of that is funding so when people do have to leave an area in mass and do have to leave the area, and the needs go up or support goes down.
So hopefully there is a robust and backlog to avoid a reason to funnel them over and there are legal side, Medicaid portability, Medicaid waivers, there is a big tension with a lot of the state shares having not only Medicaid allowed to do a single funding stream which I'm sure you know about but we have heard about situations because somebody has been injured and they're put in the hospital, if they need to even temporarily go to do some kind of rehab or get fitted for something that Medicaid then won't pay to help them get back into their house.
Those are all things that aren't even disaster specific but what happens is disaster exacerbates the likelihood that they're going to end up in the medical complex and as you know then you can't get out.
I think a lot of the prep for that is actually not even disaster specific it's home and community-based services specific.
What's happening there is it's increasing the chance that that person is going to end up in the medical system and once they are in that we all know how hard it is to get out.
That's not even disability specific.
But I think as far as disability specific big things are being able to take your supports across borders, across state borders and then Medicaid waivers.
JUSTICE SHORTER: I was going to add to it.
I wanted to add to that Dustin if you're thinking about additional things so Valerie talked about those systems and structural changes that are underway or that people are pushing for.
I think the in between or the gap-filler things that people are doing is monitoring shelters because the last people you will find in a shelter more often than not are people with disabilities.
You will find all kinds of people of color with disabilities are left in facilities and they will try to route people into facility settings because they're trying to close a shelter down so having people who are there and, again this is not the best solution, it does not take in any way responsibility away from officials who are tasked with making sure home and community-based services are available but having individuals on the ground to make sure they are there to support individuals with disabilities who are in a shelter.
Sometimes we think we can only provide support by way of donations, right?
Sometimes we can only provide support by giving water, clothes, can we talk about housing options, rooms for rent, do people have cash that they can provide to individuals so that they can pay for hotel rooms for a limited amount of time we know once you get there the money gets wrapped up in agencies and it's hard to put money down for a new place when all the money is going to the nursing home and I want to answer questions that are coming through.
Thank you all for joining us.