News and Notes 492 December 15
NARIC staff mourns the passing of Margaret Giannini, MD and Marsha Saxton, PhD, two members of the NIDILRR community who were instrumental in the independent living and disability rights movements; NIDILRR posts videos from the series Maternal Health and Disability Workshops: The Accessibility of Motherhood; This Just In... features a review covering the history and development of the concept of community inclusion for people with serious mental illnesses; the Northern New Jersey Traumatic Brain Injury System Center (NNJTBIS) posts videos from its annual speaker series Moving Forward: Personal Perspectives on Life After Brain Injury; the Mid-Atlantic ADA Regional Center announces the release of a video series, Law Enforcement and First Responder Interactions with People with Disabilities; the Center for Research, Training, and Dissemination of Family Support for People with Disabilities Across the Life Course hosts the 2nd Conference on Caregiving Research; the Southwest ADA Regional Center seeks participants age 18 or older with any type of disability for a survey to identify and understand barriers to video gaming for people with disabilities; the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) posts guide, Veterans and the Americans with Disabilities Act: A Guide to Employers.
This week we learned of the passing of two formidable members of the NIDILRR community, both of whom were instrumental in the independent living and disability rights movements. Margaret Giannini, MD was the first director of NIDILRR, appointed in 1978. Dr. Giannini was an internationally recognized expert in the care of people with disabilities, particularly people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. She founded what would become the Westchester Institute for Human Development, a leader in the areas of disability and human development. Marsha Saxton, PhD, was Director of Research at the World Institute on Disability and a principal investigator for NIDILRR-funded projects on health and wellness. She was a major founding scholar of disability studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught for 25 years. She often told her students "[t]he disability rights movement is one of the most successful movements for human rights in the world, although we still have a ways to go." Our thoughts go out to the families and colleagues of these remarkable, trail-blazing women.
