Self-Advocacy Exhibition

Featuring

Advocating Change Together

& 

Self-Advocates Becoming Empowered

& 

People First of Alabama

March 8 through April 24, 2005

at the

Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Alabama

Advocating Change Together (ACT) Mission:

To help people across disabilities to see themselves as part of a larger disability rights movement and make connections to other civil and human rights struggles.

SABE

To ensure that people with disabilities are treated as equals and that they are given the same decisions, choices, rights, responsibilities, and chances to speak up to empower themselves; opportunities to make new friends; and to learn from their mistakes.

People First of Alabama is a group of people with developmental disabilities living in Alabama communities dedicated to making our dreams happen by having choices and control over our lives. This means having opportunities to make decisions and plans for ourselves instead of having others make them for us.

Contact Information:      Lecell Lane     205-886-9295 (cell)

Advocating Change Together

• Twenty-one panel exhibit traces perceptions, attitudes, services, struggles, and achievements in the history of persons with developmental and other disabilities.

• From antiquity through the present, the exhibit brings viewers through an illustrated timeline, chronicling societal interpretations of disability through moral, medical, and cultural group models. Color-coded to easily trace models throughout history.

• Helps viewers see patterns in perceptions (through moral, medical, and cultural lenses) and make connections to other groups who have experienced institutional discrimination.

• Using plain language and hundreds of images, this exhibit connects historical themes in disability to societal values and the treatment of people with disabilities throughout the ages.

• Exhibit strikes a balance between easily understandable information and a comprehensive history viewed from multiple angles.

Self-Advocates Becoming Empowered

• Disability rights, awareness, and, advocacy videos running throughout the exhibit

• Framed self-advocacy products from self-advocacy gatherings and conferences

• Sticks & Stones Booklets:  Personal Stories About Labeling

• Respect:  Songs of the Self-Advocacy Movement

• SABE buttons, newsletters, t-shirts

• SABE Accomplishments

People First of Alabama

• Poetry

• Art

• Information about the southern history of the disability rights movement

To encourage communication and reconciliation of human rights issues worldwide, and to serve as a depository for civil rights archives and documents.