The PYD Youth Advisory Council (YAC) is a group of youth that are actively engaged with Partners for Youth with Disabilities who provide feedback and strategic direction to our youth programming. For the next five days, we are sharing each of our members’ experiences and observations about how the world around them interacts with their disability. Our first post comes from Sarah French, who introduces this series:

Introduction

By Sarah French

The world has always been a difficult place for disabled people, even at the best of times. We have had to fight not only for the accommodations that allow us to exist in everyday life, we’ve had to fight to be listened to, valued, and respected as people who deserve to be a part of society. And despite all that’s been done, there’s still so far to go, and for every two steps forward we take, we take another step back. The fight is far from over.

Every social movement in history has shown us that the people who are affected by injustice have to be the ones to speak up and tell the world what they need. But a lot of disabled people can’t participate in traditional forms of activism because of those very disabilities they are fighting for. Maybe it’s not being able to tolerate the noise of a protest, or struggling to verbalize their needs to politicians, or not being able to travel to resistance group meetings. Maybe it’s simply not having the opportunity to speak and be heard. 

That problem is what this blog aims to address. It is a single platform where disabled people can share our experiences with the world, and hopefully, with the people who can truly make a difference. A movement that inspires change requires numbers, and it requires unity. The more stories we have, and the more people we have to tell them, the better. Disabled people have so much to offer, if only the world would reach out to us. So let’s make them reach out to us, make sure they know what’s happening and what we need, and make sure the world for disabled people changes for the better.