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"I think it's extremely important that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities be a continued and increasingly strong voice in developmental disability issues of the day. And be in the rooms where decisions get made about funding,…

Bettye Dunham got her start in the disability field in 1975. She was a support person to an Indiana University student needing assistance with note taking and studying. Bettye says, “The things I learned from Chris really endeared me to the field.”…

Sandy Braunbeck grew up with an agency serving people with disabilities in southern Indiana. Now known as Rauch, Inc., it was founded in New Albany in 1953. Her father, George "Tooter" Tinius, worked at Rauch and her brothers helped with the summer…

The first Special Olympics games were held at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1968. Athletes from the United States, Canada and France participated in the games. In 1969, a group of volunteers organized the first Special Olympics Indiana games in…

"Dickerson, I finally get it," a fiscally conservative State Senator from Hendricks County remarked. "He said, 'I'm on the board of directors of the bank and we hired this fellow with a disability. I don't even know what his disability is, but he's…

"The biggest thing is the values that started with the Deinstitutionalization Project and went on through all of our projects about consumer advocacy, self-determination, empowerment to people with disabilities, language use... just totally different…

“If you want to talk about a typical day for a student with a disability, you almost have to talk about what kind of disability to be honest,” explains Nancy Kalina. A former research associate at the Indiana Resource Center for Autism, Nancy worked…

Nowana Schroeder joined the staff of the Developmental Training Center (D.T.C.) in 1975. (The D.T.C., at Indiana University in Bloomington, is now known as the Indiana Institute on Disability and Community.) Then Nowana Nicholson, she had a…

"Even though professionals are very good and a lot of times very empathetic, it's still not the same as having lived it 24 hours a day." As both a parent of an adult daughter with intellectual/developmental disabilities and a retired disability…

When Byron Smith was in sixth grade, his mother got a call from his teacher. She said, "Byron is out there on the monkey bars and he's sitting on the top bar and he's not hanging on with his hands." “My mom said, ‘Let him alone. Yes, he may fall.…