A few weeks ago I attended the Iowa Youth Leadership Forum and witnessed
a kind of miracle. No, I suppose that is largely inaccurate. A miracle requires
some inexplicable cause, some foundation in the unexplained. If I learned anything in my week at YLF, it
is that its success and its unique magic is solely the cause of the hard work
of a collection of staff and volunteers.
It would be nearer the truth to simply call YLF remarkable. It is the
greatest example I’ve yet encountered of government finding a need within a
community and working tirelessly to meet it, offering new and powerful
opportunities in place of frustration and marginalization. YLF was and is an
enduring success, a success made possible through the hard work of its many
supporters, though the passion and enthusiasm of its participants, and the
inevitable magic that comes with simply putting young people with disabilities
in a room together.
Admittedly, at first boarding for a
week at Iowa State with young people I’d never met, working 16 hour days and
sleeping on a scratchy couch held little appeal. I’d seen programs aimed to help the disabled
before. As a rule they seemed to reek of cynicism and patronization. I’ve attended events that were little more
than a half-hearted collection of platitudes and empty gestures. Really, I have to
admit I was less than convinced that the YLF could rise to meet the needs of disabled
youth. Yet, my experience quickly left me with the belief that I had seen perhaps
the most valuable service offered by Vocational Rehabilitation Services, the
Department of Human Rights and the Department for the Blind. Its impact on the
attendees and myself were deeply and immediately felt, and left me incredible
thankful that I was able to be a part of the experience. The YLF offers
something invaluable to the young disabled people of Iowa, an all too rare acknowledgement
of personal dignity.
Ones teen
years are a time of introspection and reinvention. Teens are timid and
self-effacing, quick to point out the flaws in others and slow to recognize
flaws within themselves. They have a veritable monopoly on self-consciousness,
puberty being a kind of master class of self-refinement both physical and
otherwise. The young are continually modifying their identity to please, to fit
in, to protect themselves from harm. They are creatures of remarkable
self-preservation, with egos limitless in their scope and yet remarkably fragile.
Many teens continually find reasons for self-hatred and little enough reason
for self-love. Their minds constantly work creating imagined crimes of which
they are guilty, crimes which will inevitably lead to their banishment from the
safety of the social herd. Every relationship is the ultimate unshakeable
validation, every breakup a nearly insurmountable assault to their self-esteem.
A teens feet always seem to be too big, their
waists too wide, their relationships contrived and their sexual experiences mortifying.
In short, being a teenager sucks. It is an inescapable reality of youth. To
believe yourself ugly, brilliant, short, fat, wanted or unwanted are the
constantly cycling thoughts of the young and insecure.
But what if for some those feelings
of physical otherness were not imagined or overestimated, if total social
isolation was not a constant fear but a pervasive and constant reality, if
fears of unemployability, and lifelong family dependence are compounded onto
the fears already common to the young? The unreasonably challenging experience of
disability paired with the already difficult path of adolescence can be a seemingly
insurmountable thing. This dangerous mix
of natural teenage self-consciousness and disability discrimination very nearly
dampened my future, and threatens the long term wellbeing of thousands of young
people with disabilities. This constant discrimination and self-effacement can
lead inexorably to limited perceptions of self-worth. It is after all the vicious
instinct of teens to attack those clearly different from themselves, to build
their ego through the suffering of another. The world can scarcely tolerate the
boy who talks to himself, the girl in a wheelchair whose breath smells because
her nurse don’t care about her hygiene, the young man with a crooked face and a swinging, simian gate. The propensity of a teenager to be cruel is almost
comforting in its consistency, and that cruelty is all too often directed at the strange. What is worse perhaps is that
disabled youth are isolated from their peers by virtue of the logistical
realities of disability, and are left to suffer these abuses alone.
Being disabled can be a decidedly
singular experience. It is unique in that it in many ways is an experience of
the individual, individuals left to interpret their unique challenges alone
without guidance from those who share their experience. Being born into a
specific race or cultural background presents a readymade collective identity. A Jewish child born to Jewish parents creates
no crisis of identity, it offers a seamless inheritance. Mix this with the propensity for people of
similar racial and cultural backgrounds to congregate together, and you have
the makings of an instant insular community with a strong historically
established identity. Discrimination then, when faced, can be dealt with together.
People with disabilities are largely denied this valuable minority privilege.
We are largely disabled children born to able bodied parents, curved lines in a
world of straight angles, the abnormal in a sea of normality. Our otherness is not imagined, it is the
marrow of our experience. Disabled
identity then is often formed from an individual world view, each uniquely
formed yet sharing near-universal similarities. Peppered as we are throughout society,
we are largely kept from connecting with each other, left to grow up believing
that our challenges are ours and ours alone.
This is an inherently dangerous arrangement,
as it all but assures that we will absorb whatever we are taught to believe
about ourselves and our disabled identity. Young disabled children face
discrimination, dehumanization, and are sometimes totally excluded from their
community in many meaningful ways. Those around them often confuse superficial
relationships for fully formed ones, token positions to real equal inclusion.
This culture of exclusion is an effective teaching tool, it informs a young
disabled persons feeling of worth and hope for the future, teaching them in
effect that their voice is not valued. Slowly, young people with disabilities
begin to internalize the gentle distaste, the outright disgust, the measured
and lukewarm ambivalence they are presented with on a daily basis. These
negative perceptions of disability become linked with personal
identity, the jeers and ridicule of peers become ultimately redundant. The
disabled become in effect self-censoring, automatically limiting, a bottle of
socially learned self-hatred. What
emerges then is a new socially constructed disability, one with far more dire
consequences. Understanding this environment, is it any wonder people with
disabilities are far more likely to drop out of high school? How many thousands
of disabled youth forwent college and a career simply because they began to
believe their own powerlessness and worthlessness? It is for this very reason that the Youth
Leadership Forum is such a progressive, ultimately life changing event.
Youth Leadership Forum is a program
funded through Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation Services and the Department of the Blind. Its purpose is single
minded: it exists to help young people with disabilities pursue their goals and
move towards full, meaningful employment. Dry sounding on paper perhaps, but it
is the methodology and truly high-minded approach taken by YLF that makes it
such a progressive program. It is not a camp, but it leaves its delegates
feeling as family. It is not a week of recreation, but it is held as many attendees
as being the highlight of their year. YLF is an event run by the disabled for
the disabled, a comprehensive forum to address the many barriers to long term
success. It is one week of lectures, field trips, discussion and education.
YLF’s many speakers address practical matters, strong interview skills, correct
use of social media, social skills and fostering the relationships essential
for long-term success. The scope of topics addressed are important, and the
organizers of YLF are right to include them. Yet, the most valuable aspect of
YLF addresses the constant and central theme of self-worth. From the moment
they arrive, the forum aims to erase the idea so pounded into these young
people’s thinking, the idea that their disability somehow diminishes their
intrinsic value as human beings.
YLF delegates are greeted by
disabled staff, role models who work as living examples of the possible. The staff
are almost entirely made up of former delegates, and some are being given a
leadership role for the first time in their lives. It is a mutually life
changing experience. For the delegates, they are able to see that the disabled are
perfectly able to hold positions of authority, and achieve meaningful success
in their lives. For the disabled staff, it is a rare vote of confidence in
their abilities, and a chance to explore a leadership role within their greater
community. The delegates are questioned,
listened to, and joined into a collaborative relationship with their peers and
mentors. Incredible educators like Heath Pattschull from the Johnston School System work with the students,
encouraging self-determination, assuring them that their presence in a
discussion about their future is valuable and central to its success. These
young adults encouraged to emerge as full people, told that the never-ending
discussion so central to the human experience is enriched by their voice and
their perspective.
During YLF, we all work together to establish
our long term goals and create a team of people in our lives who can help us
achieve them. We stress interdependence not dependence, the unique and valuable
elements of the disabled experience. It is a chance to explore our collective
history, to draw on the strength, perseverance, and ingenuity of past leaders
within Disability Rights Movement. Perhaps for the first time, the delegates
become seamless members of a community, their disability becomes an element
central to their identity. For that week we are all disabled together, helping
and compensating for each other’s limitations. Ours is a collective empathetic
experience, all of us made better by each other’s challenges. The impact is
immediately observed. YLF is a chance to see young people transform in a weeks’
time, changed from withdrawn self-conscious teens to vibrant, confident disabled
young adults. This transformation is not just meaningful on a personal level,
it has a profound impact on the very tangible issues facing our community. The
Director of YLF, Mike Williams understands that the single greatest barrier to
employment is not transportation, inaccessibility, social prejudice or any of
the myriad of other challenges young people with disabilities face. The
greatest barrier to employment is the personally held belief for many within
the disabled community that they are simply not worth employing. During YLF,
that profound, crippling self-doubt is systematically confronted, through
practical education, by example through others, and perhaps most powerfully by
creating a strong collective support system on which this students can draw.
YLF removes in one week the socially indoctrinated belief in their own
inferiority, leaving in its place of reservoir of confidence and mutual
support. YLF is progressive because is expounds a simple, life changing idea: our Disabilities enrich the collective human
experience, and cultivate skills valuable in all areas of life.
I remain convinced the most radical thing I’ve
ever done or could ever do as a disabled man was to imagine myself as anything
other than detestable. Fighting to
ignore that socially implanted chorus of self-doubt remains a constant
struggle, even as I enjoy personal successes. And so to see young people
given the tools they need to change their thinking from an early age leaves me
incredibly hopeful for the future. YLF
is a life changing experience, an event both practical in its approaches and
goals. YLF is profound and extraordinarily progressive in its message, and has
shown itself to be essential for the continued success both of the disabled
community and for Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation Services. It is a defense of
the idea that all meaningful success stems from self-love, the belief that a
room is better for you being in it. YLF is a miracle made possible through the
hard work of dedicated people, and simply being there was one of the singular
privileges of my life. Thank you to Mike Williams for his innovative work
establishing the program, the staff for their endless store of energy and
enthusiasm, and most of all to the delegates for daring to believe in their
future and worth as human beings.
