July 2024

Year-End Report and Honoring Disability Pride Month

Dear SIPA Community,

On behalf of the DEICE Committee, we want to share this short report on our work over the past school year, and our plans for the coming year. We look forward to working with the Dean and others to continue advancing SIPA’s DEI commitments.

We also join people at Columbia, in the United States and around the world in honoring Disability Pride Month. This month recognizes the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in July 1990, and honors the disability rights activists who worked for its passage and who continue to work for more effective implementation of its provisions. In 1990, Boston marked the first Disability Pride Day, and similar celebrations are now held throughout the month of July in New York City and many other cities. The international disability rights movement later influenced the drafting of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which was adopted in December 2006 and entered into force in May 2008.

Disability pride honors the uniqueness and diversity among people with disabilities – estimated to include more than one in four people in the United States and one billion people worldwide – and challenges the stereotypes and stigma that have long been associated with disability. Disability pride also honors the significant contributions of people with disabilities to their societies, despite the discrimination and barriers to access that they still experience in schools, workplaces, transportation and other spaces.

As mentioned in our year-end report, SIPA students have raised important issues about physical access to the International Affairs Building, and we look forward to working with SIPA administrators to further address these issues in the coming year.

We invite you to learn more about the ADA and the CRPD, and to explore these resources on the disability rights movement and the contributions of people with disabilities.

We look forward to working with you in the coming school year to make SIPA a more diverse, equitable, inclusive and accessible community. In the meantime, we wish you a pleasant rest of the summer.

Warm regards,

Jenny McGill and Michael Nutter

DEICE Committee Co-Chairs