We envision a Commonwealth comprised of inclusive communities where all people with disabilities are valued and thrive.

Mission:

The Council engages in advocacy, systems change and capacity building for people with developmental disabilities and their families in order to:

• Support people with disabilities in taking control of their own lives
• Ensure access to goods, services, and supports
• Build inclusive communities
• Pursue a cross-disability agenda
• Change negative societal attitudes towards people with disabilities

• The Council prefers work that is cross-disability in nature; while we have funded projects with a focus on one disability, we prefer to fund approaches that affect all people with disabilities in common areas of their lives, such as housing, health, employment, community inclusion, etc.
  


• The Council is deeply committed to inclusion and integration. We do not like approaches which are segregated, and will not fund "special programs for special people". We prefer activities to be alongside and integrated with people without disabilities, in regular settings in regular communities. Groups of people with different disabilities congregated together do not constitute "inclusion".
  


• We are excited by projects which change communities, especially in the broadest, generic sense. We appreciate proposals which view people with disabilities, in all their diversity as contributing members of their communities.
  


• We will view favorably projects which meaningfully involve people with disabilities, or, if they cannot speak for themselves, their chosen family members, in all areas of the project's conception, preparation and implementation. We do not like proposals which could be construed as doing things for, to, or on behalf of people with disabilities rather than under their direct leadership. We will not fund projects which portray people with disabilities as deserving pity; which, even unconsciously, endorse stigmatization of people with disabilities, or which incorporate portrayals of people with disabilities as the objects of charity or "the least of these".
  


• We believe that the skills involved in understanding disability are closely related to the skills which lead to other forms of cultural competence. For this reason we are particularly interested in projects which are led by people from a variety of cultures and which strive to make themselves open to people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds.
  


• Our preferred emphasis is on changing systems rather than people. We are less and less interested in models of accommodation which rely on the person with the disability being the person doing the changing. If we work with faith communities, we are more interested in changing the belief system of the community than the behavior of the individual; our work in employment is focused on employers, and our work with schools, focused on their behavior rather than that of the student. We are prohibited by federal law from funding direct services other than short term demonstration projects. Hence we prefer all our activities to include a systems change capacity.
  


• We believe that disability is a natural part of the human condition. We are not sympathetic to medical models of understanding disability. While we do not deny the importance of medical treatment and medical need, we are more sympathetic to understandings of disability as a social construct imposed on people with disability labels rather than as a quality inherent in the person with a disability. We are therefore unlikely to be interested in proposals which focus on the deficits of people with disabilities rather than on the social constructs which dis-empower them. We are not impressed by the model of trying to "help" people with disabilities by making them more like people without disabilities.