By Maria Samuels – WDOMI Executive Director For the first time, there is an accessible absentee ballot option available to qualified people with disabilities. For Westchester County, this applies to the June 23rd Democratic Presidential Primary only. Due to a lawsuit by a group of disability rights organizations, the NYS Board of...
By Maria Samuels By now, you have heard all the precautions, and I hope you are carefully following them. One thing I will take away from this crisis is that thanks to my disability, I have advantages that others don’t. Thanks to my blindness, I am already careful about where...
This is the first of 2020 tributes to the icons of the Disability Rights Movement. Here’s to the misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo....
Emmanuel Segarra-Otero, Fair Housing Investigator from Westchester Human Rights Commission, talks about housing laws and protected classes at our May Monthly Housing Workshop. At a recent event, a person in the audience vented his frustration at me. He was angry that I, that my agency, was not doing enough about...
DISABILITY RIGHTS LEADER FATHER OF INDEPENDENT LIVING MACARTHUR FELLOWS (“GENIUS GRANT”) RECIPIENT GOOGLE DOODLE HONOREE “The greatest lesson of the civil rights movement is that the moment you let others speak for you, you lose.” – Ed Roberts Every field, every group has its hero. The exceptional person you can’t...
Sometimes our staff wants to share a personal story about someone who affected them. Magdalena, a healthcare program coordinator, does the first entry in what we hope is a series about a few of the many memorable people that our direct care staff have had the pleasure to serve. Today...
To what word am I referring? HANDICAPPED. What has triggered this reaction, one might ask? First let me say that I usually don’t walk around calling folks to task over their choice of language, even if I find it offensive. If it is not directed to me or those I...
Written By: Melissa Lopez-Robles, B.B.A. – Housing Specialist A housing subsidy is a form of economic assistance sponsored by the government. It is aimed towards alleviating housing costs and expenses for needy people with very low or low to moderate income. This is also known as “Affordable Housing”. Although subsidies...
by Mel Tanzman, Executive Director These are the closing inspirational words to our Nation’s Pledge of Allegiance. However, as a disability and civil rights activist I know that those in power in our nation have not shown adequate allegiance to those closing words. While I don’t want to use this...
By Yaw Appiadu, MPH I have heard comments like this many times before from those that come to me for help, their voices filled with frustration. I have been assisting the aged, blind, disabled and their families with Medicaid applications for over two years. Most of the time, families contact...