Currently, I am an AmeriCorps member serving at the Disability Empowerment Center as the AmeriCorps King County Disability Consortium (KCDC) Coordinator. One of my most-important duties in this role is to organize, recruit guest speakers for, and facilitate monthly Understanding Ableism webinars led by the Disability Empowerment Center and the King County Disability Consortium. Every Understanding Ableism webinar features guest speakers who are either disability community members themselves or work with the disability community. The topics of each Understanding Ableism webinar centers around a different aspect impacting the disability community each month. Each Understanding Ableism webinar is recorded and posted to YouTube.

In 2024, I worked with the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods on their Disability Activism History Project. In my collaboration with the Department of Neighborhoods, I wrote an article about Janet Taggart, the founder of the Northwest Center, I wrote an article about a celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act in Westlake Park, and I facilitated a panel about Disability History at MOHAI.

In the Spring of 2024, the University of Oregon’s Disability Studies Minor held a fundraiser through DuckFunder, the University of Oregon’s virtual fundraising platform. The goal of this fundraiser was to expand the Disability Studies Minor into a fully-fledged program at the University of Oregon. To promote the fundraiser, this YouTube video was released, where the director of the Disability Studies minor and some Disability Studies students were interviewed about the opportunities the Disability Studies Minor offers. One of the students who was interviewed in this video was yours truly.

From 2022 to 2023, I was a member of the Coelho Law Fellowship, a fellowship for higher education students with disabilities who are interested in attending law school. This fellowship is named after Tony Coelho, the former congressman who sponsored the ADA. As a member of the Coelho Law Fellowship, I learned about the law and how it pertains to disability rights, particularly with how Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, and Olmstead v. L.C. protects the rights of people with disabilities. For the Coelho Law Fellowship’s culminating Disability Rights Project, I facilitated this webinar, which was about the experiences of college marching band members with disabilities and how marching band leadership can learn from these experiences to make their bands more inclusive for people with disabilities. This webinar’s guest speakers were Gray (formerly Bryce) Araiza, a blind drum major for the University of Oregon Marching Band, and Sarah Ferguson, a paraplegic alto saxophone player for the University of North Carolina Marching Tar Heels.

From 2018 to 2020, I was a member of the Magical Bridge Teen Kindness Ambassador Program. As a Magical Bridge Kindness Ambassador, I advertised for Friday Night Concerts at Magical Bridge’s flagship playground in Palo Alto, I introduced the performers at these concerts to the audience, and I even directed this recruitment video for the Kindness Ambassador Program. In 2018, I was awarded the inaugural Kindness Ambassador of the Year award. 

In the Summer of 2022, I was an intern at Direction Service, A Springfield, Oregon-based nonprofit focused on helping children with intellectual disabilities reach their academic and social goals. Direction Service highlighted my internship with them through this article.