Chris Rosa: President/CEO The Viscardi Center Upholding the ADA

Welcome to Disability Matters with your host Joyce Bender. All comments, views, and opinions expressed on the show are solely those of the host, guest, and callers. Now the host of Disability Matters, here's Joyce Bender.

Hi everyone, welcome to Disability Matters with Joyce Bender. I am so excited about the show today, and I want to thank all of you listeners in the United States, the Americas, North America, South America, and around the world. We have listeners from Brazil to Australia to Saudi Arabia, 17 different companies, countries with listening audiences. Hello, Richard Roberts from the US State Department in Brazil. You know I love you. And Joyce Bender, Gangyong Cho in South Korea and all other members that I've met from Indonesia to Kazakhstan to Panama. South Korea, as I mentioned, is Gangyong. Japan is where I worked with Richard and now he's in Brazil. So, hello to all of you. And Yoshiko Dart, hello, special shout out to you. Yoshiko, this is your month. Disability Pride Month. This is a big month for you as you think about your late husband, the great Justin Dart Jr. So all my love to you, Yoshiko. Uh, and I have to thank our sponsor, Highmark. Highmark, headquartered in Pittsburgh but working across the country, uh, one of the largest health providers And just a great company. They have been the sponsor for years. And here's the key thing, they hire people with disabilities. And that is what it's all about. Why I'm so excited is I wanna tell you, Dr. Chris Rosa, who is our guest, the president and CEO of the Viscardi Center, I have no words to tell you what an honor it was for me to receive the Viscardi Award. As a matter of fact, it's right up here in my office on display. So beautiful, so wonderful, and I just want to thank you.

Oh, Joyce, it's really our honor and privilege. You, you belong squarely in the pantheon of greats when it comes to disability rights and disability inclusion. The Henry Viscardi Achievement Awards has a very rich history. Our past honorees have included Judy Heumann, Justin Dart, who figures so prominently this month for all of us. He's very much with us. Marca Bristow. You absolutely are worthy of praise and mention in the same breath with those greats who have created a path of access and opportunity for millions of people with disabilities throughout the globe.

Well, thank you so much. And Dr. Chris, you are also a tremendous disability rights leader, and I've known him for a long time, and his passion has never waned in all of this time. So what I'd like to do first is hear your story. Because what happens to me is listeners, you know, whether they be in the United States, any of the other Americas, or in Kazakhstan, often they love the show but they want to know more about the guest. So this is what I always do now. I ask the guest to tell their story. So would you mind sharing your story about your childhood and how you felt when you found out you had a disability, school obstacles, you know, the road that you got on now with disability. So take it away, Dr. Chris Rosa. Let's hear your story.

Thank you for asking, and I agree with you, Joyce. I feel Like when it comes to disability identity and membership in the disability community, we all have an origin story and it allows us to situate who we are in the context of a larger movement in the arc of history of other people with disabilities who have come before us and helps us to appreciate who we are in context and all its complexity. So my journey, my conscious journey with disabilities occurred when I was just a little kid. When I was 4 or 5 years old, my parents noticed that I wasn't quite hitting my developmental milestones. Intellectually, I was doing fairly well, but in terms of my motor skills and my physical abilities, I wasn't performing in ways that were comparable to my peers, the other kids in my neighborhood. I had trouble rising from a seated position. I had trouble running. I would trip and fall a lot. I was prone to toe walking. And my parents were concerned and they started this odyssey of taking me from doctor to doctor, doctors of all types, more than 20 in total, until we found a doctor who came up with what turned out to be a definitive diagnosis of muscular dystrophy. And it was scary for my parents, not necessarily because of living with a disability. I think they were pretty enlightened progressive when it came to understanding what the potential was for kids with disabilities. But muscular dystrophy was not well known, and it was regarded as a life-shortening condition, and they were concerned that the kid that they cherished wouldn't be around to live out the dreams that they had for me, which included college and family and a life of my own. Fortunately, in terms of my medical progression, the type of muscular dystrophy I had, I have, which is limb girdle, was not quite as progressive in its progress. So I came to use a wheelchair early on at age 12. I'm 57 now. So I spent a lot of time in the saddle. But apart from that, my health has been, knock wood, very solid, and it's positioned me to be pretty ambitious in terms of my goals and my endeavors. And it's always better to be lucky than good, and it just so happened that by a fluke of history, I was entering elementary school the year that the IDEA was, was signed into law. And my parents didn't know a lot of other folks with disabilities, and they didn't know any other parents of kids with disabilities, but they were fierce advocates and activists nonetheless. And all they knew was that their kid would have the same rights and opportunities as all the other kids in our neighborhood. And, um, my mom is an information seeker. She was a teacher herself, and she, uh, learned about the IDEA and leveraged this new law to make sure that I had the opportunity to fully participate in my district school in all aspects of school life, and they set the bar high for me academically. And fortunately, I was always good at school, and that trend continued. You know, I entered college in the mid-'80s, and I was able to, for the first time, meet a community of other people with disabilities who were going to college and had a very progressive outlook about inclusion, had a strong sense of pride in our individual and collective identities as people with disabilities. We're starting to appreciate the fact that our shared experiences and unique perspective on the world might constitute a disability culture. And again, history was on my side. and I graduated from college, uh, in 1989, uh, the year when a lot of the grassroots mobilization around the passage of the ADA was afoot, and it got me involved for the first time in earnest in the modern disability rights movement. And, um, uh, yeah, obviously in 1990 the ADA was signed into law, and we all set about participating in the implementation. And I was really taken by the promise of the ADA, and I applied for a grant as a first-year graduate student that would be part of a first cohort of community leaders that would be trained by DREDEF, the Disability Rights and Education Fund, as community activists to take this newly passed law and to make it work, to create meaningful access and opportunities in all aspects of American life for people with disabilities. And not only did that become a passion and the crux of my advocacy work, but it became the basis of my scholarship as a student enrolled in a doctoral program. I was a sociology scholar who was learning about this new strand of scholarship called disability studies, which studied the disability experience from the distinctive perspective of people with disabilities themselves. And I set out to understand, like a cultural anthropologist would, this new thing that we were appreciating, which was American disability culture. And I devoted a lot of my time to writing and studying and speaking with other members of our community around the distinctive life world that people with disabilities shared in common, which offered an alternative empowered understanding of ourselves that was so counter to the traditional stigmatizing view of disabilities that was handed to us historically by Western culture. And not only did it really change my life and change my outlook, but it created a peer— a career pathway for working and writing and studying about people with disabilities in higher education. I went to Queens College, which is a college as part of the City University of New York.. And I actually went to work for CUNY, and I worked there for the better part of 3 decades, primarily focusing initially on the experiences of CUNY's more than 10,000 students with disabilities to make sure that they richly participated in all aspects of university life. But I think that the work that I was able and privileged to do on behalf of students with disabilities was recognized as having portability, and I think that my mentors appreciated my leadership capabilities and understood that I could put to work the same ethic of advocacy and inclusion and administration that I demonstrated to advance opportunities for students with disabilities, and that it was translatable to serve students regardless of ability. I ultimately became CUNY's system vice chancellor for student affairs. CUNY is the nation's largest public urban university system and it serves more than 250,000 students on 25 campuses across the 5 boroughs of New York City. I was involved in all aspects of student affairs and student life. And some of my service work kept me involved in the disability community, including board service to this remarkable institution, which is an anchor for people with disabilities in New York and, and the larger region, the Viscardi Center. And ultimately, when one of my true heroes, who I know is, is one to you too, Joyce Bender, John Kemp, who was the longtime leader at, at Viscardi, decided post-pandemic to transition to a new role in Alabama. The Viscardi board turned to me and gave me, quite frankly, the biggest honor in my personal and professional life, the opportunity to lead this historic disability empowerment organization that is the Viscardi Center. So it was a little long-winded, but that is the arc of my story.

Well, that is a great story. Great story. And, uh, what— oh, you've done so much. But with all of that, we're going to go to break. When we come back, we'll have more questions for our esteemed guest, Dr. Chris Rosa. This is Joyce Bender, America's Voice. Where Disability Matters at voiceamerica.com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Chris.

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You're listening to Disability Matters. If you have a question or comment, call in toll-free at 1-866-472-5788. That's 1-866-472-5788. Now please welcome back the host of Disability Matters. Here's Joyce Bender.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the show. And if you just joined us, we've been talking to Dr. Chris Rosa, who is the CEO and president of the Viscardi Center, uh, located And is it Albertson, New York? In Albertson, New York, not far. How far is that from, uh, New York City?

Oh, it's, uh, it's only about 20 miles from New York City.

Well, uh, it's in a perfect location, may I say. Perfect location that you're able to get there but not be in the midst of all that crazy traffic. Uh, and, you know, Dr. Rosa, I wanted you to talk a little bit more about your background, which is so unbelievably great, but your role now at the Viscardi Center. I have a couple questions. First, what do you do? Like, what all are you over? How large is the, uh, spans that you're dealing with? Uh, and I'm not clear on some things about the school which I'm going to ask a little later, but here's one of them. I know that you work with other organizations. Could you tell us, you know, how that works? And then last but far from least, tell us about Dr. Henry Viscardi.

Sure. So just by way of context, The Viscardi Center is actually a network of nonprofit organizations whose core values involve the education, employment, and empowerment of people with disabilities and their families throughout the lifecycle. We're actually 4 nonprofits. I think we're best known for our world-famous Henry Viscardi School, which you alluded to, Joyce Bender, and I'll talk about that a little in just a little bit. We also feature our Abilities Incorporated organization, and Abilities is really our founding organization founded in 1952, and it is devoted to career readiness, career placement, and independent living skill development for individuals with disabilities. Our parent organization, the Viscardi Center, is among other things the home of our social enterprises. That includes our pathbreaking Digital Accessibility Services enterprise, which is devoted to making sure that digital assets, including websites and documents, are fully accessible to all users, most notably blind and low-vision individuals. Other social enterprises which are very exciting, which I'm excited to discuss with you, are our news outlet, which is ABLE News, which was a mission-aligned acquisition that we made less than a year ago now, which is a newspaper absolutely by, for, and about New Yorkers with disabilities and the issues that are important to them. We have a current circulation of about 10,000 readers, and we're looking to build that into a multimodal news platform, leaning into digital, featuring things like podcasts and, and video assets that allow people to dig deeper into disability-focused issues and stories. We are also the home of the Museum of Disability History. The museum has a 22-year-old history. It had been located in Buffalo, New York. It's a small but powerful collection of about 3,300 artifacts The museum in Buffalo unfortunately was forced to close its doors during COVID and it never really regained the traction to reopen. We realized what a powerful asset it was, and so we made arrangements to acquire the collection. And New York State, its Board of Regents, which has oversight over cultural institutions in the state, officially amended the charter of the museum to relocate it here on Long Island at the Viscardi Center. So we expect to reopen in the fall of 2025 and see it as a powerful, uh, a powerful curation of key elements of disability history and disability culture. So those are, those are some of the things that we do, and it creates a real dynamism here on our campus. You referenced our campus in Albertson, Joyce Bender, and we're located on 16.3 acres. We like to aspire to be the 16.3 most inclusive acres on the planet. And, you know, we set the bar high for ourselves and work very hard to make sure that all the individuals we serve across our organizations have the ability to participate richly and inclusively in all aspects of American life.

Wow. Okay. Now, when you say that you are in a collaboration partnership with whatever it is with other not-for-profits. Could you just explain that a little bit more to our listeners? Like, what does that mean? What do you do?

Sure. Uh, one of our roles that, that we feel most proud about is that because of our stature here in the region, um, particularly on Long Island, we see our, our, one of our most important and meaningful roles is to serve as a convener, to use the historic stature of the Viscardi Center as a means to bring our peer organizations together and get us all pulling in the same direction on these really big and seemingly intractable issues that affect access, opportunity, and the quality of life for individuals with disabilities. So on our own, as much, as good as we think we are most of the time at Viscardi, we know we are, on our own we can't begin to make a significant impact on housing access for people with disabilities in our region, which is consistently one of the most vexing issues that families of people with disabilities face in our region. Um, but we feel that if we can convene all of the nonprofit community who are focused around access and opportunity for people with disabilities on Long Island and bring us all together and get us all aligned, uh, sharing best practices, sharing resources, sharing information, and most importantly, being aligned in our legislative advocacy we feel confident that we can move the needle when it comes to really big issues of importance to people with disabilities.

Wow. Well, you do a lot. You know, that's so impressive. And what about Dr. Henry Viscardi? I want to make sure listeners know about him. So, could you talk about him for a couple of minutes?

Sure. I'd be honored. Dr. Henry Viscardi, and I'm particularly thankful, Joyce Bender, that you asked me about him during this month, July, Disability Pride Month, is sort of an underappreciated disability rights hero in the annals of American disability history. He was— I see him, we see him as a precursor to the modern disability rights movement, and he was doing disability advocacy, disability inclusion, disability empowerment before we really had a language to describe those dynamics. He was born in 1912 to a poor Italian immigrant family. In New York City. He was born with a congenital disability and he had underdeveloped legs. In his own words, he, in his biography, he describes them as stumps for legs. And because his family didn't have much in the way of resources, living in essentially in an Italian ghetto in a tenement building. He had no access to assistive technology or durable medical equipment, which wasn't that readily available to Americans with disabilities at the time. He spent the early years of his life learning to walk on his hands, and at a certain point he became connected to a physician at New York University Medical Center who said, "You know, I could help you. I could fashion some prosthetic limbs that could help you with your mobility." And Dr.— then young Henry Viscardi at age 12 said, "You know, my family is poor. We don't have any money to be able to pay for this." And the doctor said, seeing something powerful and dynamic in Henry, said, "If you go on and grow up to impact just one other person like yourself, please consider your account paid in full." And so based on that act of benevolence, I think the desire to empower other people with disabilities, the seed was planted and it burned within him. He went on to have a career, a brief career in sales, and in 1941 when the United States entered World War II, being very patriotic, he attempted to enlist, but because of his disability was declared 4-F, But he became involved in the American Red Cross, and in the course of that service, he had the good fortune to meet Eleanor Roosevelt. And Eleanor became very taken with him and said, you know, given your experiences and your insight, you could really make an impact on— her words— our boys, who were coming back missing limbs from military service at Walter Reed Medical Center. And so, uh, Henry Viscardi went to Walter Reed and worked on, uh, community, uh, re— helping these individuals to readjust to civilian life. And when these, uh, servicemen came back from service in Europe and in the Pacific, with disabilities, they fully accepted to resume their lives as, you know, leaders of households, pillars of their communities. But unfortunately, they came back to United States where very little was expected of people with disabilities when it came to employment. And, and young Hank Viscardi was devoted to creating career pathways for these servicemen who returned from war with disabilities. And after butting his head repeatedly against walls and barriers and not being nearly as successful as he had hoped in helping these individuals with disabilities to be empowered through competitive employment, At a certain point, he said, with the encouragement of then-Secretary of the Treasury Bernard Baruch, I'm going to build it myself. And he set out to build a commercial enterprise by and for people with disabilities. He raised money and bought a garage in West Hempstead, not far from the the Viscardi Center's current location and retrofitted it for a production facility. He bid for military contracts from corporations that were producing for the war effort in and around Long Island, including big names like Grumman, General Electric, um, and he won those contracts and he was able to hire 30 people, uh, the first 30 all people with disabilities. Who ran the enterprise at every level of the enterprise. And within the first year, they were able to turn a $50,000 profit. Within 3 years, he had hired 300 people with disabilities and were grossing more than $1 million in sales. Wow. So it was wildly successful. It was really the first of its kind. And to this day, we still participate in that legacy. Our singular devotion to career readiness and career placement for people with disabilities. One of the initiatives that's starting to thrive right now at Fiskarti is our entrepreneurship initiative, which empowers people with disabilities with an entrepreneurial spirit and a bold business idea to help to develop those ideas and take them to market. So, but that's who— that was who Dr. Viscardi was in a nutshell. He passed away in 2004. His office, as he left it, is perfectly preserved right across my office. Every morning when I enter the office, I say good morning to Hank, look over to his office, and take great inspiration and the weightiness of the responsibility of being very value-centered when it comes to serving people with disabilities, making sure that we're vigilant in educating and employing and empowering people with disabilities.

What a life. One man.

Remarkable life.

One man, look what happened with one man. It's unbelievable. And at the Viscardi School, Are there limitations? Like, is it for all disabilities, certain disabilities? Yeah, it doesn't matter what the cognitive level is.

Uh, it's a very good question. We're okay. So the Henry Viscardi School was founded in 1962, 10 years into Dr. Viscardi's efforts to search the highways and the byways in and around New York for people with disabilities to participate in this enterprise. In the course of it, he came across kids with disabilities who were basically sitting on the sidelines. It was a good 20 years plus before the IDEA would guarantee students with disabilities equal access to a free and appropriate education in the most inclusive setting. So Dr. Viscardi saw that need, and on the site where the enterprise was operating, he founded the School for Human Resources, which later came to be named in his honor, the Henry Viscardi School. The school has always been about creating education— educational opportunity in K-12 for students with disabilities. As the IDEA has gained traction, um, uh, we've become more narrowly focused in our mission. We're true inclusionists here at Viscardi, and we believe that under most circumstances, absolutely the best setting for a student with a disability to be educated is in their neighborhood, in their district school. With the appropriate accommodations and supports in place. Um, but we acknowledge that, um, for some kids that may not be the most inclusive setting, particularly kids with very significant illnesses and underlying medical fragility. And that's our niche here at the Henry Viscardi School. We educate 170 students, all of whom have very significant medical conditions and underlying issues which otherwise, apart from the Viscardi School, would probably cause them to be homeschooled or to get their education in a hospital setting. These are our prime target student population for admission at Viscardi. The dimension of our mission that allows us to actively engage those students is we have a medical suite on site staffed by highly skilled and trained medical professionals who integrate these kids' care seamlessly throughout the course of a traditional school day. Our students participate in a rigorous academic curriculum. They're typically average or better than average in terms of their cognitive and intellectual abilities. The more than two-thirds of our graduating class every year go on to college. And so a typical school day for these kids might be, for a high school student, first period French, second period creative writing, Then the third period stop off at our medical suite either to get breakfast through feeding through a feeding tube or maybe if for a student who is living with pediatric cancer to get a chemotherapy treatment and then back into the flow of a traditional school day, which not only includes rigorous academic education, but really robust co-curricular programming, including inclusive and adaptive sports, wheelchair basketball, for example, a robust theater program. We have a very strong tradition of student government and student governance where students really develop leadership skills, which will serve them well as advocates when they graduate from the Henry Viscardi School. So as you could tell, I'm really proud of our unique mission.

That is very unique, and boy, how important just to get, you know, just to get those students, those young people out, you know, out of the house, not being homeschooled, just as you said. And you worked a lot. At CUNY. You worked there with students with disabilities, Dr. Chris. What did you do there?

So, thanks for acknowledging. I'm very, very proud of that work. It was really meaningful to me. In my portfolio was making sure that I had oversight over programs for the university's more than 10,000 students with disabilities. And aside from having oversight of the offices of disability services on the 25 campuses, which are typically responsible for coordinating reasonable accommodations and support services for students with disabilities. To level the playing field, one of the programs of which I'm most proud is the development of our CUNY LEADS, L-E-A-D-S program, LEAD stands for Linking Employment, Academics, and Disability Services. And it spoke to the fact that when I took on this role, I did a deep dive into the data. And I was very pleased to see that in general, our students were being retained and graduating at rates that were comparable to their peers without disabilities. Which is very heartening. It means that the promise of the ADA is working and that if you level the playing field, students with disabilities have the ability to achieve at levels that are comparable to students without disabilities. The part where we were really stumbling had to do with post-graduation outcomes, and I was very disheartened to see that despite the fact that our kids were excelling, our kids, our college kids, were, were excelling academically, they were only going on to competitive employment at a rate of about 33%, which as you know, Joyce Bender, is not that different from the national rate of employment of people with disabilities. And that was really disheartening for me because CUNY sees itself as a bridge to social mobility for poor and working-class students. The promise of a CUNY degree has always been a ramp to social mobility and to the promise of a better life. And the fact that graduates with disabilities weren't succeeding at the same rate as their peers without disabilities meant that a CUNY degree didn't mean the same thing for students with disabilities as it did for students without disabilities. So my colleagues and I set out to fix that through CUNY LEADS, our university-funded disability career specialist on each one of our 25 campuses, and they had one foot in disability services, another foot in career services, and then maybe their pair of arms working with agencies like the State Vocational Rehabilitation Agency all pulling together to try to make sure that career readiness and transition to successful careers was core to the academic enterprise at CUNY. And over the course of the first 4 years of this program, we found that we flipped the script for students with disabilities, that graduates students with disabilities were graduating at more than double the rate than before the program, that they were graduating at a rate of close to 70% within 18 months of graduation, and that approximated the employment rate of graduates, of CUNY students without disabilities. So that was a really proud accomplishment, and it showed me it's not rocket science, you know, if you commit the resources that level the playing field and create opportunity for students with disabilities, they're going to roll with it, and the outcomes will kind of speak for themselves.

Wow. Yeah, it's very, very sad, you know, what the employment situation for, you know, students with disabilities. And you You were on the President's Committee on the Employment of People with Disabilities with the great author of the ADA, former Congressman Tony Coelho. So, you have seen— you have seen this. You have seen this problem with employment. And still today, as you referred, 69% of people with disabilities are still not counted in the workforce with double the unemployment rate. So, I'm going I'm going to ask you why.

Why, why, why? There are no simple answers to it, Joyce Bender, but I can take a stab at some of the largest barriers to competitive employment for people with disabilities. I think that work disincentives. For people with disabilities are a major obstacle for individuals with disabilities pursuing competitive employment. Many of us rely on independence fostering and wellness preserving benefits like healthcare through Medicaid and personal assistance services, and as you know, Joyce Bender, unfortunately those benefit systems are means tested, and there are income and asset limits, and if you exceed those thresholds, they render you ineligible for the very benefits that many people with disabilities rely upon to get out of bed and get dressed in the morning and to live independently in the community. And rather than placing those benefits at risk by taking that breakthrough first job, many people with disabilities will shy away, saying that it's not worth the risk. And it's hard to argue with them. I mean, it's the highest-stakes decision that many people with a disability will ever make. I think that there's still a tremendous amount of stigma associated with disabilities. And while many leading employers who value DEI and think of people with disabilities as part of the fabric of diversity in companies, there's still a lot of resistance to hiring people with disabilities, largely because of myths and misconceptions about our productivity, about our ability to be retained. But as you know, Joyce Bender, people with disabilities add tremendous value and tremendous productivity to workforces, and they have the highest retention rates of any subpopulation of the American workforce. So those are just two factors which I think contribute dramatically to the lack of employment for people with disabilities.

Well, we got to keep fighting the fight to see that change, right? That's what we have to do, and that's what you are doing. So, as are you, over these years you've done so much. Chris, what would you say is your proudest accomplishment?

Thank you. I was very proud of the CUNY LEADS program that I just discussed, not only because of its impact and the data demonstrate the transformative impact it's had on the lives of people with disabilities and their families. I was proud of the fact that I was part of a coalition of people who did, who built it together. Great people with disabilities and their allies who saw an opportunity and saw a need, and together we filled that need and created a platform of opportunity for people with disabilities. I'm early on in my career at Viscardi. I'm about I'm halfway through my third year. But I'm particularly proud of the two mission-aligned acquisitions that we made this past year. ABLE News is a really remarkable publication. It's written by, for, and about people with disabilities and the issues that are important to us in, in the New York region, and I'm excited about the potential of it to be a multidimensional platform where people with disabilities can explore the issues that are most important to them, to explore disability lifestyles and disability culture. And as somebody who's a disability studies scholar, who cherishes disability history and disability culture, I'm thrilled that we were able to acquire the museum. I've never been in the museum business before, but I, I value our history, and the notion that we could play a role in preserving and amplifying American disability history and culture and its impact is, is very thrilling to me. And Joyce Bender, the thing that I'm most excited for about this museum opportunity as we see it as a great teaching and learning space for our young kids with disabilities that we serve at the Henry Viscardi School. They're gonna get a chance through this remarkable resource to learn about their own history and their own culture and to be able to articulate its impact in their own terms and in their own unique and distinctive voices.. And we're— we envision a model where we're gonna bring in peer groups of kids without disabilities to learn about disability history and culture through field trips to our museum, but have our Viscardi students be the docents so that they can teach peer-to-peer disability history and disability culture and learn about that history and culture from their own distinctive perspective. That's thrilling to me.

That is thrilling. And where will that be again?

Uh, it's going to be on our campus, uh, in Albertson. Um, and again, it's very close to New York City, just off, uh, major, uh, highways. Uh, there's going to be a lot of parking. It'll be open to the public, and we're also eagerly looking to attract groups, whether it's groups of students or corporations with ERGs, disability ERGs, who want to use the space to do team building and to explore what the richness of disability history and culture means to their corporate culture. We're really excited about the possibilities.

Oh, that is awesome. So, Dr. Rosa, look at everything you've done. Oh my goodness, you've accomplished so much against the odds of what many people with ableism would say. So tell me, who is your role model?

So, uh, I have a few. Um, uh, obviously, like so many of us, uh, Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann, uh, and Dr. Viscardi are my iconic disability rights heroes. They, uh, I, of the three, I only got the chance to meet Judy, and I consider it to be one of the big thrills of my life. But these are paragons of disability leadership and disability advocacy, and if I could make a fraction of the impact that they did, I would consider my life and career, life and career well spent. In terms of what it means to be a good leader here At Viscardi, there are two people in particular. One is Judge Rob Papia, who is one of my role models. He's my boss as a member of our Henry Viscardi Board of Directors. He was the first judge who's a wheelchair user in New York State to be named to the New York State court system. He's a Viscardi alumnus, and he's taught me a great deal about leadership, advocacy, and what it means to be a good man. So he's one of my role models. And when it comes to being a good CEO, I was fortunate to be mentored by a gentleman. His name is Bob Ross. He was the founding the founding executive director and president of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. And Bob, after a wildly successful career, had evolved the organization to the point where he spent the last years of his career doing nothing but finding ways to say thank you for empowering people with disabilities. And my goal is to evolve the Viscardi Center in all its dimensions to the point where it's essentially running like clockwork and I have the bandwidth to spend the bulk of my days saying thank you to all of our allies and stakeholders who are so singularly devoted to the education, employment, and empowerment of people with disabilities. And just thanking them for their faith in the people that we serve.

Well, what great role models. And you know what, young people, if you're listening to the show, you just found a great role model in Dr. Chris Rosa. Make sure you look him up and look up the Viscardi Center. Well, Dr. Rosa, thank you so much for joining us today. I just loved having you on the show. And if anyone is listening and thinking, oh, I wish my friend could have heard this, remember, all you have to do tomorrow, go to Spotify, Apple, VoiceAmerica.com, BenderConsult.com, and you can get this podcast and share it with someone else. Make sure you do that. This is my favorite, one of my all-time favorite quotes. Dr. Chris, we end every show with a quote, and I found this quote by Dr. Henry Viscardi, who said, "I will not trade my dignity for a handout." Oh, that's so powerful, and you can believe I'll be using that, Dr. Chris, when I speak anywhere. I will not trade my dignity for a handout. So thank you, everyone. Now listen, you've got to listen next week because yes, it's a tribute to Judy Heumann. You will actually hear Judy on my show to end the celebration of Disability Pride Month. Don't forget. And in the words of Mary Brooker, I have to end this show by saying, remember, choose joy. This is Joyce Bender, America's Voice, where disability matters, at voiceamerica.com. Talk to you the week after next after you hear that great show with Judy Heumann.

Voice America would like to thank you for tuning in. Please join us next Tuesday at 11 AM Pacific Time and 2 PM Eastern Time for another installment of Disability Matters right here on the Voice America Variety Channel. We are the leader in live internet talk radio. VoiceAmerica.com.