About
The mission of Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance (HADA) is to create a community and provide a forum of Harvard alumni, faculty, and experts to promote opportunities, participation, inclusion, and civil and human rights for people with disabilities.
Within the Harvard alumni community, there has yet to be a Shared Interest Group organized around disability. Harvard alumni with disabilities, or whose family members live with disability, have unique experiences, considerations, needs, and virtues that have not yet been either reflected or shared in a formally recognized, disability-related SIG.
People with disabilities, of which there are more than 1 billion around the world and many within the Harvard alumni network, encounter unique and multiplicative barriers to social participation that have precluded their involvement in many aspects of life.
The lack of community and inclusion of many people with disabilities is detrimental; it is detrimental, not only for people with disabilities, themselves, who can remain marginalized from the communities of which they are a part and the futures they can create, but also detrimental for a world that is made better, richer, and more just by virtue of this very inclusion.
Work towards this collectively-beneficial end requires everyone.
In order for members of this community to be visible and engaged – and, as a result, for the prevalent perception of disability to be deconstructed and reconstructed – it is important for Harvard disabled alumni to share experiences with one another, and it is incumbent on thought leaders from all disciplines and people from all backgrounds to be a part of making change happen.
Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance will create the space for Harvard alumni who care about disability to unite around a shared identity, and bring together individuals who can help to make new conversations and solutions a reality.
The vision for Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance is to create a world in which disability – physical, emotional, developmental, intellectual, psychosocial, sensory, visible, and invisible – is reflexively brought into every major social and political conversation, and that people with disabilities are visible in every social circle and every part of life.
It is our hope that, through the work of this shared interest group, we can set the gold standard for disability inclusion and create a model to be emulated in organizations, institutions, legislative bodies, and communities, the world over.
In order to achieve this mission and vision, Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance will pursue the following objectives and conduct the following tasks:
● Unite Harvard alumni with disabilities and allies in a worldwide network characterized by empowerment and enablement.
● Liaise with Harvard Clubs, Harvard Shared Interest Groups, and Harvard faculty and staff to promote newly-established Harvard Alumni Disability Alliance SIG;
● Engage with Harvard alumni from all disciplines who share in their desire to augment opportunities for people with disabilities, seeking their involvement or support;
● Conduct quarterly meetings designed specifically for community-building, networking, and relationship-development;
● Create mechanisms by which current and future Harvard students with disabilities can find opportunities both within and outside of Harvard.
● Explore intersections of disability and social disciplines.
● Establish partnerships with Harvard Alumni Association Shared Interest Groups that have already demonstrated a commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, access, and allyship, to learn from their history and successes, to avoid potentially previous missteps, and to develop a network built on common concerns, common compassion, and common humanity;
● Connect with the diverse programs, departments, schools, and centers across the Harvard campus to identify faculty either working on or interested in disability-related matters;
● Present information and ideas to Harvard faculty of all disciplines to discuss potentially unexplored intersections between disability and their work;
● Host lectures and panel discussion on disability as it relates to social, political, legal, technological, design, and art issues;
● Solicit feedback and ideas from HADA members on experiences with barriers and opportunities.
Devise policy, technological, design, and sociocultural interventions to address challenges experienced
by people with disabilities in these areas.
● Design a SIG Board of Directors that includes alumni with disabilities, as well as faculty members and key stakeholders from a variety of academic and social disciplines that either do or should include disability;
● Work with Harvard faculty and key stakeholders in the drafting of articles surrounding disability and diverse social disciplines;
● Meet with Harvard faculty and key stakeholders to discuss challenges experienced by people with disabilities and how disciplines can address them;
● Host events, both through Harvard and outside the institution, that highlight disability-inclusive work.
● Elevate disability as an affinity, advocacy, and accessibility issue.
● Create pipelines for employment and opportunity for students and alumni with disabilities;
● Help engender a commitment to disability inclusion that mirrors social commitments to the inclusion of other historically marginalized groups;
● Assist the University in all its initiatives and guises in how to achieve greater participation for alumni with disabilities;
● Move towards the creation of a disability-related Hall of Achievement.