Utah’s MulDiNet Leaders: The Work Isn’t Done

Sessions and slides from The Multicultural Disability Conference are now available—and free. The event brought together professionals who sought better understanding of how to serve people and families who are experiencing disability from all backgrounds.

The conference, held in Salt Lake City, follows three years of networking, training of service providers, and listening to stakeholders by Utah’s Multicultural Disability Network, part of the IDRPP. Topics included disability among refugees, disability in addition to complex sociocultural contexts, disability and mental health challenges, digital accessibility, disability and aging, and disability in rural communities.

All the sessions pointed to the many different walks of life experienced by people with disabilities. “In Utah, one of every four adults are people with disabilities,” project director Eduardo Ortiz, Ph.D., said in an interview. “People with disabilities who live in rural areas have different contexts compared with people who live in urban areas. People who are at the older ages, 65 plus years, are very different compared with people who are younger. People who have a socioeconomic context, different from others … are going to face disability in a different way.” Ortiz said the project’s advisory board was structured to ensure its members were from diverse backgrounds.

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities are three times more likely to be hospitalized or visit the ER, IDRPP Executive Director Matthew Wappett said in his presentation. “Many of those visits… are directly correlated with mental health issues or crises.”

“We need to understand each other better,” said Ortiz.  “When we are interacting with each other, we can understand better each other, and approach solutions or options in a better way.”

The current political climate makes these differences harder to talk about, but no less necessary.

 “I think the general consensus … is that the work's not done,” said Mindy Dokos, the project’s media manager. “There's an urgent need for continued conversation and an urgent need for continued advocacy, especially for these populations that … have these complex contexts that make it that much harder for them to be getting either the services that they need, or the health care that they need. … The big part of our conversation, as part of this project, is how to be humble and come together and talk.”

 “It doesn't mean that we all agree,” Ortiz said. “We can have disagreements and those disagreements are important to know. … If we know what we agree on, we can be more effective in different interventions that we can develop.”

Both Ortiz and Dokos were conscious of how difficult those conversations can be. Could professionals separate disability issues from politics?

“It is a large part of our community,” Ortiz said. “Politics needs to listen to the community.”

“I think that we can,” Dokos said. “Eduardo often has kind of this spiel that he shares at the beginning of our meetings to remind everyone that we're not here to debate, we're not here to judge each other, we're not here to argue, we're here to listen and learn together and be kind and respectful.”

 “We start listening,” Ortiz said. “We start approaching the solutions. We start looking at priorities. And that is powerful.”

To find out more about Utah’s MulDiNet project, visit their website.