Four individuals discuss their stories in the work place in the face of their disabilities. 

Mindy Scheier is a mom of three, an entrepreneur, and an authority on accessible fashion. She is also the founder and CEO of the Runway of Dreams Foundation, which she started in 2014 with the help of her son Oliver, who has a rare form of muscular dystrophy. Oliver wanted to wear jeans to school like his peers; so Mindy took on the request and modified a pair of jeans for her son to wear the next day. Being in the fashion industry and inspired by Oliver's new jeans, Mindy began her journey designing adaptive clothing that enthuses people with disabilities.

As a renowned leader in adaptive clothing and advocate for inclusion, Mindy collaborates with mainstream brands to make modifications for their present and future apparel lines. These adaptive pieces are wearer friendly, stylish, and encourage conviction, autonomy, and self-expression for people with difference. Her design work has also earned her the award for Ark Catalyst Marketing Influencer of the Year; Mindy also kicked off New York Fashion Week in the fall of 2019 with a runway show, featuring models of all abilities.

Recently, Mindy chronicled her fashion vision and the Runaway of Dreams Foundation mission, of “working toward a future of inclusion, acceptance and opportunity in the fashion industry for people with disabilities,” with our Different & Able President and Founder, Alexandra Nicklas. Mindy’s design modifications enable people with difference, by giving them the power to choose their own fashion. With a flaunt forward fashion mentality and her contagious exuberance, Mindy’s philosophy on accessible fashion shines, “Where there is a will, there is a runway.”

We recently had the good fortune to interview Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham, co-directors of the celebrated documentary Crip Camp, which tells the story of how a camp for children with disabilities became a training ground for a whole generation of disability rights activists, including Judy Heumann. Enjoy! 

“It’s inspirational that you turned out so well adjusted, considering everything you’ve been through…” 

Inspirational? I’ve just figured out how to live my truth and take every life experience as just that: an experience. All those experiences have pushed me forward and made me stronger as a person. My cousin often tells me that when I tell her stories about growing up.

Today, I am 29 year old, a full time preschool teacher, a published author, a passionate entrepreneur, and a fierce advocate for differences, inclusion and kindness.  

This is how I choose to describe myself, because I've worked hard to reach this point.

I was born with what is now categorized as a craniofacial syndrome called Craniofrontonasal Syndrome. When I was born, back in the eighties, doctors told my parents that my craniofacial differences along with my cleft lip, cleft palate, and midline deformities had nothing to do with one another. Several years back I did my own research and found out that, low and behold, there is in fact was a syndrome which matched my medical history almost perfectly. 

In the span of about 18 years, starting when I was only a few weeks old, I had over 12 surgeries, the most recent at the age of 22. I don’t clearly remember the earlier surgeries, however, they left me with physical and emotional scars.  

My craniofacial differences were physical and did not affect my cognitive functioning. I did have some learning disabilities, but by the time I ended high school, I was in honors classes.  I never let anything in life hold me back. I have always mastered skills and created my own path at my own pace and in my own way. 

While they did not affect my cognitive abilities, my differences did have a rather large effect on how I felt socially, particularly in middle school, but also to some degree in high school. I had many friends but never quite felt like I “fit in”. While my family and friends accepted me with all my quirks and differences, strangers noticed my differences and their looks made it clear to me how they felt. Children would stare and laugh or make comments. Parents would pull their children away, sometimes even staring too. I always smiled and waved as a child, but as I grew older, it became evident that some people were uncomfortable with the unknown and they didn’t understand why I looked different. Of course now I devote most of my days to teaching acceptance and inclusion as well as speaking on how to interact with other people who may look different. 

When I am not advocating in schools or via social media, I am helping out with organizations that share my goals, or teaching, singing and doing photography. I also enjoy spending time with my friends, my mom and my two dogs! 

If I could give advice to parents that have a child with a craniofacial difference, I would tell them, first and foremost, you are not alone and there is a community of people out there waiting to embrace you and tell you its going to be okay! Secondly, I would advise parents to focus on what your child can do rather than what they are struggling with. This strength-based approach has a strange way of helping children accomplish their goals. I would also tell those parents that one day down the line, their children are going to look them in the eye and thank them for all they have done for them. And they will sure as heck mean it with every fiber of their being. I am continually grateful for my family--to them I say, I wouldn’t have been able to get through it without them! 

When I speak to children who notice that they are different, I tell them to embrace that difference! I tell them that there will be some people in the world that may not have the most appropriate ways of interacting with them, but there is also a large community out there who will stand with them and shout their worth.  Though you may feel different, you may very well have a kindness army on your side! Whatever challenges you face, you are stronger, braver and more capable than you even know. Trust that time will heal many of your wounds and build your confidence. This is your life so own it!

About Rena:

Rena Rosen is the founder of ‘Art of Compassion’, a platform dedicated to creating a higher level of acceptance, appreciation and understanding of physical differences among parents and children in our community. Since creating 'Art of Compassion', Rena has spoken at over a dozen schools, summer camps, and organizations. She has co-authored and published the children’s book, The Courage to Be Kind, with her friend Jenny Levin, and has established a large social media following through her Facebook page. She is also involved with ‘Changing the Face of Beauty’, an organization that provides a platform for individuals with disabilities to speak out about inclusion in advertising and media.

Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, directed by Jim LeBrecht and Nicole Newnham, tells the story of Camp Jened, a unique-for-its-time summer camp for people with disabilities of all kinds. Not only did Camp Jened, in Upstate New York, provide many campers with their first experience of a truly accessible space, it also became an accidental organizing site for the disability rights movement, since many of the movement’s leaders had become friends at Camp Jened. 

The first part of this astonishing film tracks the experience of director Jim LeBrecht, who traveled to Camp Jened for the summers during his teens. As LeBrecht explains in the film, he was told that this was a “camp for people with disabilities run by hippies.” He was attracted to the idea of Jened because of this counter-culture influence. When he got there, he found that what he had been told was the truth: the young counselors at the camp encouraged their campers to explore freedoms in various important ways, many of which they had never had access to as teens with disabilities. This may have been partly because the counselors were not much older than teenagers themselves, and because they, like the campers, they had come to Jened for freedom and exploration.

This relaxed atmosphere was combined with an ethos of radical accessibility. As Lionel Je’ Woodyard, an able-bodied counselor who came to Camp Jened from Georgia, explains, the campers at Jened were used to being left out in their lives at home. They weren’t allowed to play sports, for instance, at school, or if they were, they weren’t picked for the team by their classmates. Many of them weren't even allowed to attend regular public schools, but were placed in institutions. But at Camp Jened, as Woodyard explains, everyone was expected and encouraged to participate to the fullest extent of their capacity and interest. Counselors and other campers created accommodations for each other on a moment-to-moment basis. Accommodation was the expectation, rather than the exception to the rule. What's more, as we see in the film, decisions at the camp were made in radically democratic ways: when they had to decide what to make for dinner, for instance, campers held a long discussion and a vote. No issue was too small to be discussed and worked through together.

This might not sound so radical to those of us who were born after the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Those who are a bit older, however, know better. When Camp Jened was running, there were no federal laws which protected the rights of people with disabilities. There were no federal laws which prevented discrimination against them on the basis of their disabilities. People with disabilities were barred from crucial experiences because they couldn’t count on the government to protect their rights. For instance, if you utilized a wheelchair to move through the world, what were you to do if your employer was on the second floor of a building? Unless your employer willingly added a ramp, you had no recourse. You had no right to demand that a ramp be installed, and no ability to do so with the government’s support. 

The second half of Crip Camp shows how a number of campers who had gone to Jened together became the leaders of this crucial civil rights movement, in particular a remarkable young woman named Judy Heumann. After having been a leader at Camp Jened, Heumann moved to San Francisco where she became an advocate for the rights of the disabled. Soon, with the help of her Camp Jened friends and many more organizers and activists, she was leading a civil rights movement which was demanding equal protection under the law for the disabled. 

We won’t ruin the ending, but suffice to say that the United States would be a very different place if not for the activists who began to organize at Camp Jened. 

Crip Camp shows disability in all its complexity, never failing to treat its subjects as three-dimensional characters. Unlike so many representations of disability in popular culture, it does not shy away from the radical and transgressive aspects of its subjects' lives. The campers and activists of Crip Camp are provocative, intelligent, earnest, and hilarious. They are people who have sex and get angry. In a world which rarely depicts people with disabilities as anything but asexual angels, this kind of representation could not be more welcome. 

Not only will Crip Camp inspire you to fight for the rights of all, but it will remind you that when ordinary people work together they can accomplish amazing things. 

We’re lucky to be interviewing Jim LeBrecht on Wednesday June 17th, 2020. If you have questions for Jim about the process of making the film, post them here.