ADA Story July 16: Laura Newell
My ADA Story: What the ADA Means to Me
By Laura Newell
Left to right: Rob Newell, NCCDD Systems Change Manager Philip Woodward, NC ADA Network Coordinator Karen Hamilton, and Laura Newell at the National ADA Symposium in Chicago in May 2017
I appreciate the ADA because people with disabilities are not deprived of our rights because we want to be given the same opportunities as everyone else. I have the right to live in a condo that I choose to buy and not wherever my family or someone else picked out for me to live. I had the right to get married, but, if he had been on Supplemental Security Income (SSI), then being able to get married would have been challenging due to the SSI marriage penalty that keeps some couples from getting married for fear of losing their benefits.
I had the right to get a job, and I had a job coach who helped me to learn my job, and I have been at InReach since April 1993, but my job has changed some through the years. I am in a unique position to not only work at InReach but to get services from them as well. I started off as a part-time receptionist to a full-time office assistant, and now I work at the day support and activity center doing office work, but I am also a peer support specialist. I wrote a book on rights with pictures after realizing that some of our customers did not know their rights, so it made it easier for them to understand.
I am the founder of the Self-Advocates of Mecklenburg (SAM) group, which was started in November 1998, and we have advocated for different things and have participated in some advocacy projects such as the door force gauge (measuring how much force is required to open doors at businesses that serve the general public) and accessible menu projects. We have been to some county commission meetings and Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) bus meetings, and we have been to talk to legislators in Raleigh several times, and we have been to Washington, D.C. to meet with Congresswoman Alma Adams. When we started the day support and activity center in September 2015, we realized there was not a bus stop very close by, and it was hard for some of our people who did not drive or have staff to take them to the day support center since they did not want to walk three blocks and walk across three streets, so we advocated for the change with a petition and meeting with someone from CATS, and they finally put a bus stop close by a couple of years ago. We have also gotten some people registered to vote, so it was awesome when some of them voted for the first time in 2016. They took pictures of them outside of the voting area with their “I voted” sticker on, and we put them on a poster.
I now have two staff, Delores and Clarrisa, who are helping with things around the house since we have been in quarantine due to the COVID-19 virus, but they will also help with the SAM meetings as well. Now I am learning how to use Zoom for virtual meetings. I am going to be leading a financial webinar for our customers in June. I wrote a book called Lindsay that was published in 2010 and I am now looking for an affordable option for getting book #2 published. They are Christian romance novels about a princess, Lindsay, who gives up her castle and crown to marry an American politician, and she is an artist with a stuttering problem.
Last year I went through this ADA training with Karen Hamilton along with some of our other people from the SAM group. So, that is what the ADA means for me: that I can accomplish anything I set my mind to.
Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the ADA