Rebecca Vallas Launches the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative

Rebecca Vallas (’09), Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation and Co-Director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, coauthored an essay for the National Academy of Social Insurance introducing the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative, a partnership of The Century Foundation and the Ford Foundation that applies a disability lens across economic and social policymaking to address barriers to economic security facing people with disabilities (“Disability: A Missing Lens in America’s Economic Policymaking,” Oct. 5). “[W]hile we have made progress as a nation toward the goals underpinning the ADA, the unacceptable levels of poverty and hardship among disabled people that have persisted well into the twenty-first century make abundantly clear that we still have much more to do. . . . [W]e will never achieve true economic justice if we fail to achieve economic justice for people with disabilities.” Describing the program as “a first-of-its-kind initiative that brings together more than 40 disability leaders, leading think tanks, and research organizations to learn from each other and work together,” Rebecca noted that the Collaborative will “set multi-dimensional benchmarks defining disability economic justice more meaningfully than America’s current, flawed poverty measures—which are woefully out of alignment with what it costs to afford a basic standard of living in the U.S. today.”
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