ADAPT is a national grass-roots community that organizes disability rights activists to engage in nonviolent direct action, including civil disobedience, to assure the civil and human rights of people with disabilities to live in freedom. Formed by a collective of local ADAPT Chapters, National ADAPT has worked for the past 30+ years to promote community living for aging and disabled people through reform of the outdated long-term service and support system. An essential part of living in the community is the ability to participate in free and fair elections. There must be full accessibility to the ballot box and the electoral infrastructure including but not limited to the two-party system. In order to ensure that voters with disabilities are able to participate in the voting process, people with disabilities must be able to vote by mail, utilize curbside voting, and voting sites and voting machines must be accessible. And whether at home or at polling places, people must be allowed to obtain assistance from others if needed. The overall process should make it easier for older and disabled people to vote and not hinder their right to vote.
Voting rights and Build Back Better are of equal importance to the disability and aging community. Build Back Better must be passed with $150 billion for affordable, accessible, integrated housing, and the $150 billion for Home and Community Based Services.
Build Back Better will provide the necessary expansion of Home and Community Based Services (HCBS) under Medicaid to address the current need for services for disabled and aging Americans. It will guarantee a “living wage” and benefits to attendant care workers employed in home care which will assist in recruitment and retention of this workforce It will expand affordable, accessible, integrated housing development and rent subsidy programs targeting low- and moderate-income people with disabilities, especially people receiving HCBS services, and it will provide support to home accessibility modification programs that will enable people to leave or avoid institutional settings, thus saving millions of health care dollars
In honor of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, we remember the importance of engaging in direct action and civil disobedience to advance the policies that keep America moving toward an accessible and inclusive community for all. Tactics that are very much embedded in ADAPT activism. “Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.”- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
We call on Congress to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the Freedom to Vote Act, and the Build Back Better Act.
TAKE ACTION!
Contact your Senators at the Congressional Switchboard and ask them to support these important bills.
Call them at 202-224-3121
Send them messages on social media as to why these issues are important to you. Remember to tag National ADAPT.
Follow National ADAPT https://linktr.ee/adaptnational
