Disability Pride Month
Celebration, acknowledgment, confrontation, listening
July is a month of celebration, acknowledgement, confrontation and listening. It's Disability Pride Month.
We celebrate the rich contributions that people with disabilities are, and bring to society. Their extensive experience in overcoming obstacles, negotiating and persevering. These experiences and knowledge weave through their innate skills and talents. People with disabilities hold deep capacity to enrich, strengthen, diversify and build resilience into their communities.
Despite being pregnant with contributions to the community, people with disabilities come across negative attitudes and stigma. As an adult with cerebral palsy, I encounter people who relate to me as if I'm childlike. Instead of fellow contributers to society, people with disabilities can be perceived as mere recipients of care and charity. It is timely that we examine our attitude and those that exist within society. That negative attitudes are exposed and confronted.
Disability Pride Month is a focused time to partner with people with disabilities to build inclusion and accessibility into community. To advocate alongside them, identifying and removing the barriers that prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in community. Identifying and removing different types of barriers requires working in partnership with people with various types of disabilities… or impairments.
Below is the Disability Pride Month flag.
The differently coloured stripes represent different types of impairments.
Green represents invisible and undiagnosed disabilities. Blue represents mental illness while white represents sensory impairments. Yellow represents neurodiversity and development impairments, and red represents physical impairments. The stripes are diagonal to represent cutting through barriers people with disabilities face. The black background remembers people with disabilities who have died as a result of abuse, neglect suicide and illness.
Hearing from and learning from people who have lived experience of disability is an effective way to begin to confront negative attitudes and partner with people with disabilities to identify and remove barriers.
Disability pride month is it time to;
Celebrate the values of people with disabilities and their contributions to society.
Confront any stigma or negative attitudes that we find within ourselves or in our communities.
Work together for inclusion and accessibility
Hear from people with lived experience of disability
As we are in the third week of July, there is time for us to celebrate, acknowledge, confront and listen. Are there reflections that you can make room for? What practical steps can you take?