Abilities Advocacy Club

DSS is pleased to have the opportunity to work with a student club formed in 2015 by students Melissa Del Rio and Nina Riesen, with then-advisor Angela Tucker. Abilities Advocacy Club (AAC) is an official ASSP club at SPU.

You may be interested in this club if you:

• Are a student with a disability
• Are a student concerned about issues of accessibility, mental illness, and stigma
• Take part in the reconciliation conversation on campus, and want to get more involved

If you are interested in joining, or would like more information, please email dss@spu.edu.

The goals of the AAC are to create a safe environment for students to talk about what it feels like to have a disability at SPU and to promote awareness to the campus of accessibility issues and stigma surrounding disabilities. Media can be a helpful tool to show what normal is for those of us who are differently abled or neurodivergent. Here are links to articles and websites you may find helpful:

• “What Anxiety Feels Like”
• Animated Minds

And finally, SPU alum Tatsuro Nakajima ’16 wrote several articles in The Falcon about abilities advocacy.

• “Using terminology that values personhood”
• “Lack of representation disturbing”
• “Abilities diversity important”