Elijah Armstrong/Noor Perez: 2021 Paul Hearne Award Winners

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 the show, to everyone in the United States and around the world. Uh, you know, I have great followers in different countries around the world. But we are going to be sending out a message in a few minutes to our brothers and sisters, people with disabilities in the Ukraine. So if you are in another country such as Poland or Czechoslovakia, I, I just hope that for anyone English speaking, you hear this show and you get the news out. I have to say first, a shout out to my friends From the U.S. State Department, Richard Roberts, Cheryl Harris, Gangyoon Cho, and Venyamin. And Venyamin, we are all thinking about you and all my friends in Kazakhstan. We all are thinking about you. And of course, I have— what can I say? Yoshiko Dart, always with me, always behind me. Well, you know, we have a very, as you all know, horrible situation going on in the Ukraine. I can think of no other word, but I am so honored. I was just telling Marcy Roth, the CEO of WID, I was just telling her how much, how honored I am to serve on the board of WID, the World Institute on Disability, and especially right now, because this is what we are all about. And Tina Marie Duff is like just a champion disability rights leader. I mean, she is there all the time when you need her. Um, you know, I just think the world of her. And, uh, so I, I asked them to be on so we could make a special statement and let all of you know what's going on so that you could help this endeavor and help with your resources to fund it. Marci and Tina Marie, welcome.

Thank you. Thank you so much.

We always appreciate your leadership and the reach that you have to folks around the world supporting the rights and justice for all. Always people with disabilities first.

People with disabilities first, that's right. Uh, well, you know, we'll start with you, Marci, uh, and then, you know, Tina Marie, just jump in, uh, wherever. But tell us what's going on with people with disabilities in the Ukraine.

So this is Marci speaking, and, um, Folks may or may not be aware, there are well over 2.7 million people with disabilities who live in Ukraine. In fact, with a population of over 40 million people, it would stand to reason that, you know, at least 15% of them, maybe much higher, are people with disabilities. The very horrific truth is many of them live in institutions, psychiatric hospitals, orphanages, and carceral facilities, and they are in large part trapped and being left behind. There are also millions of Ukrainians with disabilities living in the community, also trapped and being left behind.

Which is horrible. I just want to make one comment. You know, I'm living with epilepsy. And I was thinking about this. If I stopped having access to my anti-epilepsy medication, I would in fact have a seizure. And everyone knows the story of how this company started as a result of an accident at a movie theater when my disability was misdiagnosed. And keep in mind now, I was not in an automobile. I was standing at a concession stand and fell and hit the floor and fractured my skull. My point being, imagine being without medication if you are right now in the Ukraine living with epilepsy. There are children that have hundreds of seizures a day, but there are people that have many a day or several a week. To not have that medication in fact, would possibly lead to death. So that's what I thought about even the other day when I was thinking about you, Marcy, and this incredible work you're doing as the CEO of WID. Tina Marie, we all love you, Tina Marie. What do you think about all this?

You know, so this is not my first opportunity to partner with WID. And we're so familiar with the story, whether it was Hurricane Katrina or Maria, Iota, of the unique needs of the disability community not being addressed and being left behind, whether it's evacuation plans or access to communication. WID's been great at a lot of proactive planning. This is a situation now where the advantage of proactive planning for crisis relief and evacuation support wasn't a luxury. And getting to individuals who have disabilities and helping to prioritize them when many organizations do not because of resources and capabilities, that I think this is such a gap. And having teams— being able to be behind the scenes helping to put together teams and having access to local community advocacies and suppliers, employers is something that, you know, I can to help support. And so I'm just happy to be able to work with WID, work with groups like Kingsman Philanthropic and GADRA and other organizations to help get these people and our colleagues and other individuals like myself with disabilities out of Ukraine and into a safe area with the support they need.

Um, well, let me ask you this question. You know, in life we all get a chance, one decision, one decision you make. Like the person that at Highmark made the one decision, yes, Joyce, we'll support you, and look what happened. But in this case, one decision of contributing funds could in fact be saving a life. I just gave you an example. Marci, how do you contribute to this at WID?

So, um, this is Marci speaking, and so to be clear, our work is in support of an incredible, uh, women with disabilities-led Ukrainian organization. They are called Fight or right. Uh, some of them have evacuated, uh, some of them remain in Ukraine, and we, the Global Alliance for Disaster Resource Acceleration, have been supporting them around the clock. So everything we do is in support of their leadership, and we need help, we need financial assistance, Thankfully, Bristol-Myers Squibb has continued to be generously in support of our Global Alliance for Disaster Resource Acceleration. Their employees continue to contribute, and then Bristol-Myers Squibb matches those donations. We are also very grateful to AT&T, who has connected us with the Mobile Giving Foundation, and we have been able to establish a text-to-give campaign. This campaign makes it possible for people to donate on their mobile phone, any carrier, any phone, and you can simply text WID to 20222, and your phone bill will be charged $10, and 100% of that will go to our work in support of Fight for Rights and Ukrainians with Disabilities. You can also text W-O-R-L-D, also to 20222, and you will then donate $25 through your carrier. We are incredibly proud to be included on a list of humanitarian organizations included in the CNN Impact Your World list. And you can go to CNN.com/impact and then go to the World Institute on Disability and donate to support this work through there. And, of course, you can always reach out directly to me, Marci, Marci@wid.org. Some of the work that we're doing is very much in support of the incredible work that Kingsman Philanthropic does. They are veterans and folks who've worked in special operations who are on the ground and assisting us in evacuating children and adults with disabilities in Ukraine.

Joyce Bender, Joyce Bender Foundation. Joyce, Marci's been incredible, such an incredible advocate in making it so easy for people to contribute. And she mentioned the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation, which continues to match our employees' donations. And support GADRE and WID. And maybe some folks were grabbing pens, so I know you'll give an opportunity to repeat the text to give, but I just want to say for your individuals and your listeners, everybody can make a difference somehow, some way, even if— whether it's being with a financial donation or sharing a social media post and creating awareness. Or reaching out to their employer or their employer's foundation or friends and advocates. We all can help raise awareness and give in some way a little piece of our heart and our efforts and our energy to this very worthy cause.

And this is Marci, and the support that we are seeking again, is in support of disability leaders in Ukraine, in support of the ongoing efforts to support those local disability-led organizations. This is what the Global Alliance for Disaster Resource Acceleration does. We bring humanitarian action together with the folks closest to the ground, closest to the pain. And we appreciate anybody's help, certainly financial, sharing information is extraordinarily helpful. We're so grateful to our corporate and foundation sponsors. We are also just as grateful for any efforts that folks can make in supporting these local disability-led organizations, uh, trying to protect and evacuate people who, uh, freedom-loving people in a democratic society who have been attacked.

Oh, so, so powerful. Uh, Tina Marie and Marcy, you know, uh, we are all behind you. I want to say that you can share this show. It's on demand. You can share this show so that people hear this over and over. I know around the world people are listening. Could you give us that AT&T number again.

I'm happy to. The AT&T text to give is, if you want to donate $10, W-I-D to the phone number 20222, or the text number 20222, And if you type in WID, W-I-D, you will donate $10. Same number, 20222. And if you type in WORLD, W-O-R-L-D, you will donate $25. And you can always visit our website, www. Www.gaid.org. And you can support us both by signing up for the Global Alliance for Disaster Resource Acceleration, and as well, if you would like to make a donation through PayPal. Finally, you can also visit CNN Impact Your World, and that's www.cnn.com/impact and scroll over to World Institute on Disability.

All right. Well, you know what? Thank you so much. You're champions. That's— to me and to the world, you're champions. Thank you for coming on and sharing that with our listeners. And we are behind you. And most importantly, Ukrainians with disabilities, we're here. Thank you, Marci and Tina.

Thank you, Marie.

Thanks, Tina Marie. Thanks, Marci.

Love you too.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

For having us.

Of course. Wow, how powerful is that? How powerful. I'm on the board of WID, so I was happy to do this. But I think I have our two superstars with us. Elijah Armstrong and Noor Pervez, are you with me?

Hello, this is Noor Pervez.

Yes, I hear both of you, Elijah and Noor. As you probably can tell, this was sort of like an emergency statement we wanted to make. I'm on the board of WID, and Marcy brought this to my attention, so. For people around the world, we just want them to know, and for people in the United States, we want you to know how you can help. But it's great to have both of you on the show today. Since we do have people around the world listening, let's start with your story, like where you grew up, where you went to school, you know, what major you pursued, just about you. Elijah, we'll start with you.

Well, first, my name is Elijah Armstrong, he/him/his. The shortest version of my story is that I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida. I am an epileptic, and I went to a school called Stanton College Preparatory School. It's a public school in Duval County. The lights in my math classroom flickered. They caused me to have seizures every other day, and the school refused to accommodate me. They told me that if I needed an accommodation, I would have to leave for the integrity of the program. So I ended up pursuing legal action against them, which helped me connect to the disability community in D.C. I became a huge advocate for disability in education. I went to Penn State and studied education and public policy, and then I got my master's from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. And in that time, in my time at Penn State, I founded Equal Opportunities for Students, which is an org that I am registering as nonprofit right now. And through that org, I run my H.E.A.R.N. Project in partnership with the Cuello Center and AAPD, and it is a scholarship for students with disabilities called the Human Armstrong Award. So yeah, that is who I am, and I am excited to talk to you all today.

Awesome. And hi, this is Noor. I use he and him pronouns. I am originally from North Texas, and I grew up in a relatively large, although kind of dispersed, Muslim community there. Graduated from the University of Texas at Dallas with a bachelor's in emerging media and communications, and I moved up to D.C. to pursue a job in policy communications, and I am currently working on the project that I am completing with the Hearne Award, which is the beginnings of an easy-read translation of the Holy Quran that is more accessible for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

I think that is so awesome. I do. I think that's great, and this is why they are Paul Hearne Award winners and disability stars. I just want to say that, as you heard me say on the show earlier, I too, like Elijah, live with epilepsy, as does my mentor, Tony Coelho. So you see the whole connection there. Elijah, when you first realized you had a disability, Your challenges growing up, would you say it was mainly the school system or society at large? What would you say?

Yeah, it was— I have always been very sick. Like, even when I was a kid, I would get strep like 9 times a year. Like, I've always been very, very sick, but I didn't realize that I really had a disability or that it was really a major issue until I ran into that issue with the school system where the school was telling me that, you know, I wasn't allowed to attend and that I would have to leave. And yeah, there were a lot of societal issues too. It wasn't just the way that I was treated in school. The way that my story ended up making it to the newspaper and the way that people would talk about me there. The way that people like alumni of the school and just people in the area in general, the ableism and other forms of bigotry, the racism as well that they directed towards me. My family was really upsetting. It really made me realize not only that I had a disability, but really made me realize the implications of ableism and the ways that it interacts with other forms of discrimination.

And how about you, Noor? How about you?

I would say— so I always have kind of a complicated answer to this, but the short version is that I knew fairly young that I was kind of in a glass closet almost where I knew that, like, I knew that physically I had a lot of differences and that I was perceiving the world around me differently because I have EDS. So I have connective tissue stuff that just kind of impacts how your body functions. And I am autistic. So both of those things, like, I didn't have the language for, but everyone around me seemed to kind of process like, "Oh, this one is a bit different." They didn't have the language either, but they just kind of went with that assumption. I would say that the real challenge that I had for most of my life, especially as a kid, really, was just that I wasn't really given the tools or the resources to learn about disability as an identity or to really learn about about, like what resources were available to me as a disabled student and as someone who had both a lot of advantages and a lot of great skill sets that came along with kind of the hyperfocus and the love of learning that my disabilities gave me, but also like a lot of challenges in terms of navigating a learning environment that I didn't really have the appropriate tools to handle. So I would say that, like, that was my initial biggest challenge, just kind of finding the tools to understand myself and where I fit and the tools available to me legally, like accommodations, to let me have those spaces. And I would say that I kind of had my, like, emerging from the class closet moment when I found those definitions for myself and I learned about kind of my various diagnoses and about disability history, and that wouldn't happen until well into college. So by that point, you kind of, you develop your own systems, but you don't necessarily get the benefits or the resources necessary to find community without kind of having the words, having the language. So that was kind of one of my entry points there. I also did find that accessing faith spaces was a great struggle for me because there wasn't really an acknowledgement of disability in the spaces that I inhabited. And frequently when I asked for help, there was also just a sense that, "Oh, we don't do that here," or, "Why would you need that?" So kind of the cultural differences, I would say, and the cultural aspect of figuring out how to pursue acceptance when you yourself don't have all the tools just yet was kind of my biggest challenge with that growing up.

Well, continuing on, Nora, you have a desire to work in the area of intersectionality that you put an emphasis. Why is that? And also, you know, when you hear companies talk about intersectionality, Do you think that they include disability as much as they should?

So, I would say that intersectionality, as it was originally coined, is meant more as sort of a lens to see how people who have more than one identity group kind of have unique problems and unique issues caused by how different types of oppression just kind of layer, right? And in that regard, I don't think that most of the places that are trying to approach intersectionality as a movement have quite succeeded in the sense that there's frequently, like, acknowledgment of kind of a couple of different identities. In some cases, it's really well done. In some cases, great DEI work. But frequently, there's not so much the acknowledgment and the work towards people who are what I like to call the both/and, so both disabled and a person of color, for example, or both, like queer and Muslim, for example, like all of these things kind of layer together and they create this really vibrant understanding that we have of all of the different ways that we can be people, but also all of the different ways society makes it harder to be all of those different variations of people, right? So I don't think that they're doing disability right necessarily as a whole, and I don't think that they're including disability enough as a whole, but I would also emphasize that, like, I don't think that intersectionality as a whole has quite been given its original intended treatment in those spaces by that same token. And that also kind of feeds into why I think intersectionality is such an important kind of lens that I want to shape my work and to shape the work that I do in the future, because like there's the inherently selfish part of it, which is that I am a lot of different things and I'm from a lot of communities that historically speaking haven't seen each other, haven't recognized each other, and haven't really made space for people like me who are more than one identity. But there's also all of the people that I've met along the way in my life and all of the communities that I've met that want to do better and that want to understand and to try and build our spaces and our resources and our activism as a collective to better include disabled folks, people of color, LGBT+ people, and all of the various types of marginalizations that we kind of encounter in the world that we've got, as beautiful and complex as it is, you know. I think that the way to do that is to kind of center the most marginalized, and I think that intersectionality as a concept and as, like, a way to frame what I want to do with my work is really just kind of an inherent connection to that desire to build those spaces and to make room and to make space for all of us that have been left behind. By our broader movements, whether in some cases actively, but in the vast majority of cases by just kind of this hyperfocus on us as individual separate things rather than as kind of these multilayered complex movements.

Yeah, well, that— you are really passionate about that, and thank goodness you are with what you're doing. What did it mean to you to be a Paul Hearne Award recipient?

For me, it basically meant that there was progress being made in terms of, like, the openness and the willingness of the disability community to try and kind of build that intersectionality from within, even if it wasn't always happening externally. And that was a really big moment. I really value the fact that, like, we are willing and able to bring in, like, communities that there aren't as many resources aimed at that are community-led or community-oriented. There are definitely things out there for disabled Muslims, but the vast majority of the time it isn't being led by us. So that was a really big deal to me that they were willing to take a chance on the idea that this could work and that projects by and for us could in fact be something that the community would value.

Yeah, we're really proud of you, Noor. And we're also proud of Elijah. What did it mean to you to be a Paul Hearne Award winner?

It was super cool to be a Hearne winner, especially considering all of the people like Emily Ladau and Lydia X. Z Brown and Ola, who I'm personally friends with, like, who have done so many cool things with their projects. And to see all of the awesome work that they've done, it was really awesome to be given the same award and put in the same space, which was really cool. And one of the first people actually who I met when I first came into the disability community was Oli Cantos, who was one of the first ever winners of the award. That was really a cool moment for me when I first had the announcement. Also, I want to second what Nora said about there isn't a lot of spaces that specifically focus on education in disability. I was really happy to see AAPD being willing to trust that I would take this project on well and invest in that. I'm so happy to see the way that it's grown to this point.

Well, I mean, it's so important. It's so many— I hear stories constantly, Elijah, constantly. High school students with disabilities with, we'll say, a learning disability that teachers would say, uh, oh, you're just not learning, or you're not paying attention, and did not provide an accommodation. I mean, I could go on and on. So what you're doing nationally is so, so important. You know, I'm so proud of you also, and I know Tony is, but what you're doing is so important. I don't know why this is. You would think it wouldn't be like this in the world of education, but it is. It is really. I mean, you went through that for years, right? —than no accommodations.

Yeah, I did not. My IEP meeting that we had to sue to get was actually given to me. We had the IEP meeting 2 weeks before I graduated, and I was a senior at that point, before I graduated high school, and I was a senior at that point, so I did not even have classes anymore. Yeah, they, they really did everything they could to make sure that they would not accommodate me while I was still a student.

Horrible, horrible, uh, just unbelievable. Elijah, how about if you tell us about the Equal Opportunities for Students and the Eumann Armstrong Award?

Yeah, so Equal Opportunities for Students is the organization that I founded when I got to college. It was an opportunity for marginalized students of all kinds to tell their stories and explain the kind of nonsense that they experienced from various administrator groups or just— and also to share resources for students to be able to support each other. And the Human Armstrong Award is my H.E.A.R.N. project where we run an award, partner with the Kuelow Center and with AAPD. We run an award for students with disabilities who have experienced ableism in education and fight against ableism in education. So we select 6 winners actually, one of them, and we released videos on all 6 of the winners. And we try to have them tell their stories, I am trying to think of a word, like colloquially. We try to have them tell their stories in a way that people can understand, like in plain language. And actually one of our winners, Naeemeh, a UChicago student, where producing her video later this month. So I know Joyce, we have been talking about having a little celebration and having an event where we can have her talk to and Kat Perez who runs the Cuéllar Center and really have a discussion around mental health and accommodations in school. So I am really excited to further that conversation and hopefully have that event soon. But yeah, that is what we do.

Yeah, that is equally exciting to me, and what you're doing is making, you know, such an incredible difference. And as you know, I have that campaign at the, uh, Bender Leadership Academy, the Mary Brocker Mental Health Initiative, and the campaign is Not Ashamed because, as Eve Hill said, who is the chair of the board of the Bazelon Center on Mental Health Law, which I'm also on that board, is that shame is the biggest problem. You know, there are students in high school deal with bullying, deal with people making fun of them. And so for that reason, they don't even want to admit that they have a mental health disability. So I'm excited also to partner with you and have an event because I love what you're doing, Elijah. I love it. So this Yuman Armstrong Award, I guess you met Judy Yuman and got her involved in this?

Yeah, I've been working with Judy pretty extensively on the award. Working with Judy has been absolutely great. It's awesome to be working with Judy, someone who's, you know, so accomplished and so legendary in the space. It's really been great to work with Judy.

She has been on my show several times, and her, her book Being Human, one of my— oh, it just overwhelmed me— greatest things is when in the back of the book she has kudos to different civil rights leaders. And when I saw my name there, oh, I was overwhelmed because Judy— well, she's Judy, she's Judy Heumann. So I, I am so glad, uh, that it's called Yuman Armstrong. That is so awesome. And Noor, when I heard that you were going to make this Holy Quran accessible, I thought, wow, how the heck is she going to do that? So what are you doing? Where are you on this project, Noor?

That's a great question. So The way that this basically has worked is that the funding from the project has gone towards some operations costs and the majority of it has gone towards hiring an easy reader, so someone whose job it is to read the original Arabic text and to translate the text into English easy read aid, like as just like words on a page, a graphic designer whose job it is to look through the translation and to create associated visual aids while following and respecting Islamic traditions. So namely, not like showing obviously like the faces of people because idolatry, that whole thing. And we also have a translation consultant whose job is to essentially go through and make notes as kind of a sidebar to add additional context basically about the history and the time period that the Quran was written in so that it is easier for people who are completely new to the context, who have no realm of experience around this, to kind of have a better idea of kind of the influences on the text and basically how it works. Because translating what's essentially like very, very long-form poetry and story into Easy Read is already complicated enough, I figure that we should probably add in additional context. So we are kind of taking this in batches at a time. So this first round of hiring has gone towards creating the first— creating two surahs, so two chapters of the Quran to be translated. We have those pretty much ready. Those are extracted. And at this point, we are at the point where we are focus grouping. So we are basically putting these in touch with people who are Muslims or Muslim-adjacent folks, so people who grew up in the community but may no longer identify as Muslim, who have intellectual or developmental disabilities, to process and read the book and talk to us and provide feedback. And based on that feedback, we make changes, we make revisions, and we go through a handful of like religious checks essentially to run past scholars. And then at that point, we have a PDF that will be generated, put up on our website at theeasereadquran.com, and it becomes freely available for people to access. And the idea is that we use this same team along with folks who have volunteered to be backup staff or transit out staff if there are emergencies and what have you to continually kind of go Sora by Sora and get as much of this done as we can at a time and to just kind of continue going through that whole thing until that is completed. And, you know, the hope is that once we have kind of the initial 2 chapters out there, that we can continue to seek additional funding so that we can hire more people, so that more chapters can get processed at a time, because it's inherently a really time-intensive process. It's definitely going to take years. So, that's roughly where we're at, and that's roughly what the process looks like.

Well, it's a good thing. So I hope people fund the projects of both of you. Elijah, how about you now? What are your dreams for your future work, for example, with your project or anything? What, what are your plans as a disability rights leader?

I really want this project to be able to continue lasting for a time because of how pervasive— and you can see it online. So many different places are now branching out. And there are more places specifically on disability Twitter that are having these conversations around ableism and education. More groups based on supporting each other through these shared experiences. But there aren't a lot of places that have the ability to actually provide funding of any kind. So I think that we're very unique in that aspect. And I would really like to see that continue for a really long time. Because I think it is something that is very needed. I know it is something that I would have benefited from had it been around back when I was in high school or in college. Personally, I am currently a fellow with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, which is cool. So, I am, I am working there for the next year and really diving more into explicitly political work is something I am currently doing and enjoying. I know I want to go to law school at some time in the near future. But, yeah, really having the time to make sure that this award is something that can be sustained long term is something I am really looking to do over the next few years. Wow.

Well, you know what? I hope everyone gets behind Both of you. Elijah, what is your— if someone wants to make a donation, where do they go?

We are still working on getting the 501 status, but our website is equalopportunitiesforstudents.org. I will say it again. It is equalopportunitiesforstudents.org. And on Twitter, I am @ElijahIsAProphet. All lowercase, no spaces. Yeah, so you can reach out to me there or through our website. Yeah, and we'd be more interested— we'd be definitely interested in giving you more information or being in contact with you. I know there are a few people who have said that they are interested in donating, and we really, really appreciate it because it's important to make sure that we fund projects like this so we can continue supporting the disability community. Wow, that's wonderful.

How about you, Noor? How could people make donations to you?

We are currently in the process of getting transferred over to a— oh goodness, I am losing the language right now. I apologize. We are currently in the process of having— of getting housed under a C3 as I am an affiliate project. So we are currently kind of sorting out the backend on that. In the meantime though, if folks want to keep up to date on when donations open back up again as an option, we are on Twitter as @EasyReadQuran, and we have a Linktree there that links to our website, and when our donation page is active again, it will be up there.

Hey, both of you, what's the Twitter again? Elijah, are you at Elijah the Pro— at Elijah the Prophet or at Elijah Prophet? What are— Elijah's a prophet.

E-L-I-J-A-H-S-A-P-R-O-P-H-E-T. Elijah's a prophet.

That's easy to remember when I think of Elijah in the Old Testament, Elijah the Prophet. And Noor, you're at what?

The project is at EASY, E-A-S-Y, Read Quran. So E-A-S-Y, R-E-A-D-Q-U-R-A-N. And my personal Twitter is @snoringdoggo, which is S-N-O-R-I-N-G-D-O-G-G-O.

Yeah, and you know, um, when you're talking about making the Holy Quran accessible, you're talking about accessible for all disabilities, or what are you talking about?

So in specific, our original aim is to focus on making the Quran as accessible as possible for folks with intellectual and developmental disabilities. However, in the spirit of intersectionality, we are taking steps to try to be as inclusive as possible. So, for example, we are making a plain text format of each individual chapter as we go. So, plain black on white, high contrast, no images, and screen reader accessible. And we are also in the process of figuring out— and this is another long-term goal— the process of getting audio recordings of both the original Arabic and the Easy Read translation so that people who are on the website and are clicking through to the individual sets of chapters will have the ability to hear it in addition to actually, like, having the final project to look at and read. However, that is a longer-term project, and that's going to require additional staff and additional funding. So that is on the horizon and hopefully in the future.

May I ask what caused you to choose intellectual and developmental disabilities, which I think is so awesome, but what led you to do that?

Absolutely. So part of it is just kind of that the resources that do currently exist around intellectual and developmental disability and Muslims are fairly minimal, and particularly those targeted at us as, like, people who are within those communities. So me, for example, as an autistic person, falls under, like, the developmental disability category. There's a lot of resources that if I were to search developmental disability resources and Muslims, I could come up with a with a handful of resources aimed at our parents and aimed at trying to keep, you know, us able to go to the mosque, for instance, or maybe physical modifications for prayer in some cases. But I wouldn't necessarily find resources aimed at me, the individual, like, autistic person that exists. And by that same standard, for people with intellectual disabilities, there's an even greater strain of that and an even greater sense that your individual autonomy as an individual Muslim is seen as not so much mattering because the thought process is, "Well, you can't really understand faith." Like, "You can't really process and be fully immersed in and involved in faith," is kind of the thought process that I've run into a lot in my life. And Confronting that discrimination head-on, to me anyways, requires kind of interrupting that cycle of accessibility— of inaccessibility, rather. Because the basic 3 steps in that are that the IDD person shows up, there's not resources that are easily accessible to them, and frequently you're in this really large, overstimulating environment without people who are really accustomed to or willing to think of you as part of their community. You might ask for resources. There are none, and there's not really incentive for the people who are there to provide you with any. So then the person with the intellectual or developmental disability leaves, and they might tell others in their community, "Hey, I don't really think that that space is for us. It feels really uncomfortable to be there, and it feels like people don't want us there." And that's self-perpetuating, right? So the way that you interrupt that, in my mind, is a combination of self-advocacy and also just kind of confronting, like, the power there at its root, which is this idea and this lack of acknowledgement of our self-advocacy and this lack of acknowledgement that we can We can be, and we are, a part of the community. So providing materials that are accessible as a route and as a tool so that you can go to a Quran study, for example, and participate on equal footing, or that you can go to, say, an Eid prayer and be able to have something to follow along with, can really kind of interrupt and change that.

Wow, that is so awesome. Well, before we close the show, I have— I will start with you, Elijah. Who, who is your role model?

I have so many people that I really appreciate the work that they do and the things that they do. I obviously, I really appreciate Judy. Since I have gotten to meet him, I have really appreciated my time working with Tony Quello. I met Latasha Brown as well, the co-founder of Black Voters Matter while I was at Harvard, and she is absolutely amazing. I would say to distill it all into one person that I can think of, I would say, if I could say like right now the kind of work that I would want to do would be sort of Stacey Abrams, I would say, would probably be the one person that distills most of it. Together. But that is a really good question, and there are so many people who I appreciate in so many different ways, and people who have supported me a lot and helped guide me to be able to do the kind of work that I am doing now.

Wow. Those are definitely good choices. How about you? Who would you say, Noor?

I would say that it is really difficult for me to narrow it down to one person as well for similar reasons. There's so many people doing things that I admire. I would say that the people that I return to the most frequently would be the— it's kind of more of a category than an individual person, but I grew up— or, well, not grew up, but rather in college, a lot of my advocacy and a lot of, like, the skill sets that I learned revolved around other LGBT— around kind of college-age LGBT+ organizers and LGBT+ grassroots organizers in the South in general. There is a strong history of us showing up and taking a lot of steps to take care of each other and to kind of take mutual aid really seriously in a part of the US that frequently is actively working against our populations. So there's that on that level, I would say that kind of history of LGBT+ grassroots organizers in Texas. If I had to kind of pick a more individual person currently, I really admire the work that TL Lewis is doing.

Oh, and you know what, alongside the heart, I'm sorry to end this, sorry to stop you, but I can see how much I love both of you because I didn't realize where we were. This has been so interesting, but thank you both for being with me. You'll love this, Elijah. We'll use every end of every show with a quote, and today that quote is, "The truth is the status quo loves to say no." said Judy Heumann. This is Joyce Bender. You saw her two superstars today. Make sure you spread the news. This is Joyce Bender on Disability Matters. Stay tuned next week for state— running for state representative Jonathan Lovitz. Talk to you then, and remember, choose joy.

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.