Empowering Latinos with Disabilities to Address Issues of Independent Living and Disability Rights

Abstract

SUMMARY Latinos with disabilities have historically been underrep-resented in efforts to set the disability agenda and promote disability rights. This manuscript describes a capacity-building approach to community empowerment. Our goal was to empower Latinos with disabilities, increasing their degree of control over services and decisions that directly affect them. The capacity-building approach is grounded in a contextual/behavioral model of empowerment of people with disabilities. This approach emphasizes developing partnerships with local advocacy organizations and encourages active participation of people with disabilities and their families in identifying and addressing their own needs. Such capacity-building includes six major steps: (1) community entry and project planning; (2) identifying community concerns and strengths; (3) community organizing; (4) action planning; (5) monitoring and feedback; and (6) sustaining community organizing efforts. We illustrate the process with an example of an effort to promote compliance with the American with Disabilities Act in the Latino communities of Chicago, which resulted in over 70 actions and 24 outcomes over a period of 10 to 16 months. The capacity-building approach represents a community psychology effort to support ethnic minority individuals with disabilities in their struggle for equality and justice. To date, it has yielded encouraging results. Challenges for implementing this approach to community empowerment are discussed.

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