2023 John Winske Memorial Awards

Dear Friends,

Thank you so much to all of you, not only for being here tonight but for being here for us day in and day out. This July marked five years since

I returned to DPC, and four years since I took over as Executive Director. I’m immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished in that time, but absolutely none of it would have been possible without the support of our community. If you have donated or sponsored, have submitted testimony or shared a story, have collaborated with us to serve members or changed policy, or reached out to us to share information, you have been an invaluable part of this work, and we are grateful for your support.

We have a truly exceptional group of awardees tonight. Shaya French spent years fighting for disability rights at Boston Center for

Independent Living, including leading the immensely successful AHVP campaign alongside our own R Feynman, and they’ve carried that success into their new work at Senior and Disability Action in San Francisco. Dr. Cheri Blauwethas been not only an exemplary physician and a powerful advocate, but has been perhaps the greatest torchbearer for the need to have more people with disabilities represented in Medicine. I had the pleasure of working with her firsthand during the process of revising the state’s Crisis Standards of Care, and I know she will have an enormous positive impact as Chief of Medicine at Spaulding Rehabilitation hospital. Finally, Senator Lydia Edwards has been a steadfast champion of marginalized communities, and the disability community has been no exception: from being a strong voice for the needs of our community during the worst days of the pandemic, to recently fighting to keep masks in hospitals, to being a staunch advocate for higher PCA wages and working to prevent abuse in nursing homes, Senator Edwards has used her platform to look out for our community.

2023 has flown by, and we’ve done a great deal that we can be proud of. I’m proud to say that two of our priority bills, one focused on wheelchair repair and another on estate recovery, have gotten out of committee, something which we hope will soon happen for our healthcare nondiscrimination and disabled parents’ rights bills as well. We’ve worked with MassHealth to strengthen and preserve

OneCare, improve policies for wheelchair repair, and prevent redetermination from causing loss of coverage in our community. We deepened our work with the Deaf community, including holding multiple successful legislative advocacy workshops, for which we were recognized by the Massachusetts State Association of the Deaf last week. Most significantly, we won another major funding increase for the Alternative Housing Voucher Program, growing it to more than $21 million including carryover funds and getting vital language changes that will let the vouchers be used to produce new affordable accessible housing.

Meanwhile, our research team is concluding two multi-year projects with researchers from Brandeis, one on the importance of care coordination and one on the impact of opiates on people with disabilities, and we’ve launce a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation-funded study in greater Springfield to examine the barriers that Disabled People of Color and non-English speakers encounter when trying to access Long Term Services and Supports. Our My

Ombudsman program has maintained a high standard of service as it has expanded to cover the entire MassHealth population. Since January of 2022, when we began working with Fee for Service members, we have fielded thousands of inquiries and worked on nearly 2000 complaints by MassHealth members, all while maintaining an average member satisfaction rating above 80%.

2024 looks set to be an even bigger year for us. We plan to go all out to push our critical disability legislation across the finish line, and to make AHVP bigger and more effective than ever before. Our MyOmbudsman program conduct more outreach than ever before and add language capacity in Mandarin and Cantonese. Aside from our Springfield project with RWJF, we will be launching two new multiyear research projects, one with Brandeis focused on person-centered planning and a completely new partnership with the Institute for Community Inclusion focused on Progressive Employment. And speaking of employment, I’m happy to announce that—after a successful pilot funded by the Boston Foundation—in 2024 we will be launching a new Training and Education department that will be offering disability- focused DEI training and HR accessibility consulting to employers in Boston and beyond. Through this work, we aim to tackle head on one of the greatest remaining issues facing our community: the exclusion of people with disabilities from employment.

Whatever we do in the next 12 months, we know that we will be able to succeed because we have so many friends and allies and such a strong community behind us. With your help, we plan not only to preserve John Winske’s famous credo of About Us, By Us, but to bring it to fruition in more areas than ever before.

With gratitude and excitement,

Colin Killick
Executive Director, Disability Policy Consortium