Who's the intended audience for this book?

So one of the things that when Charlie was talking, he was talking about what we need to do as a community to fight to keep the ADA and the 504 and the supports that are in place.

We also need allies, right? So while I wrote this book, thinking about telling the stories of people with disabilities i was thinking about telling them mostly to non-disabled people who don't understand what the disabled life looks like and they're not all the same but there are some similarities the idea being we cannot do this ourselves the civil rights movement needed people who were people of color the women's movement needed people who are not women we need people who are not people with disabilities to understand how critical these rights are for us and understand how important it is that we be able to participate fully in our communities to also work with us.

So if you don't understand, if you don't have friends or family members who have disabilities, or even if you do and you want to learn more about disabilities and you want to understand how much people contribute, how human the people in this book are, how much you are similar to them, build some understanding and build some empathy.

And then at the back of the book, I talk about how to be an ally and what next steps people can take.

We really need everybody who cares about another human being and their right to have a full, rich life to be in this with us.

Who else, in addition to Charlie Carr, might we come across in this new book, Jennifer?

So one of the other people in this book is a young woman named Saran Tugsarjal.

Well, I know you also talk about beginning with belonging, so what does belonging look like for people with disabilities versus just simply being included?

So there's something that one of the people in the book, this gentleman named Puneet, when we were talking about this topic and what it is to live with a disability, he said belonging for him is when he knows that he was expected there and wanted there.

So that means that people thought about him before he even arrived, and they cared about creating spaces where he felt not only that he could access them, 'cause access looks different for everybody, right? For some people it's a ramp or an elevator, and for other people it's a room that is not, like, super loud or has harsh lighting, right? All these different things that make the room physically accessible, um, that's the first step.

The real sense of belonging is...

So I had somebody recently tell me that they came into a space that was physically accessible for them, and they sat down at a table, and nobody spoke to them.

So that person was describing to me something that was technically accessible to them, but a space in which they didn't feel like they belonged.

So they felt like they looked different, they moved differently than the other people in the room.

So talk about that and why you felt like it was important to express, tell people stories through multiple forms of expression.

A floor.

Accommodations for, yeah, a floor, but accommodations in schools and workplaces that require companies to have physically accessible spaces.

We're trying to do that, and then we're also trying to push forward from that floor.

But we have to hold on to that, and there's real challenges to... keeping what exists.

And so I guess I think the first thing I would say for people who want to help, like use your voice, use your body, come to meetings, come to rallies and protests where we're trying to support Go talk to your lawmakers.

There are so many different organizations that are going and working within the political system to try to get people to not do away with in-home support services, to not reduce the amount of money or assets that you can have in order to qualify for those services, to not cut them from 60% or X number of hours a week to fewer number of hours a week.

There are people who literally need that.

Those are mine.

Was there ever a season when you struggled to separate who you are from what you were experiencing physically?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I don't think I've had that question before.

I appreciate it.

Um, like I said, that was...

I don't know.

Maybe I never separated who I was from what I experienced physically, but I think when I got older and my arthritis was more visible, right, I have a mobility disability.

Uh, you've dedicated much, uh, of your time in storytelling So, uh, why does storytelling have such a unique power to create empathy and understanding between people?