As a proud disabled woman of colour, and your donor relations manager at CAPE, I have curated three resources for our community to learn from on this day. I invite you to have a look and to share them with your networks.
Having worked on issues of health, environment, and equity for 15 years, I have identified significant gaps in the inclusion of disabled people in the environmental movement.
My graduate studies advisor, Dr. Jeffrey Masuda of the Centre for Environmental Health Equity, helped me to describe this beyond “environmental ableism” to “fossil-fuelled ableism.”
Invited to collaborate with the University of Winnipeg’s Climate Atlas, I recently co-directed a short film, “Cripping Climate Adaptation: Disability Justice and Climate Change (link to captioned video)” in order to illustrate these key issues in an accessible way (link to descriptive video.)
Through this project, I also met Dr. Sébastien Jodoin, director of the Disability-Inclusive Climate Action Research Programme at McGill University. Two weeks ago, his team completed their systematic analysis, “Disability Rights in Canadian Climate Policies.”
My disability mentor, Dr. Nancy Hansen, editor of The Routledge History of Disability, alerted me to the “Launch of the WHO Global Report on Health Equity for Persons with Disabilities” taking place on Sunday, December 2nd. Click to register.
I hope you find meaning in these lessons and I look forward to helping you build more health equity into our work at CAPE.