Disability inclusiveness training for Jewish organizations is coming to the Washington, D.C., area. The Jewish Federation of Greater Washington and Matan, a Jewish disability inclusion group, are partnering to offer a program called the Lieberman Fellowship.
Matan and the Federation began their partnership 18 months ago when Matan began an inclusive community assessment for the D.C. region, according to Meredith Polsky, the senior director of programs and partnerships at Matan.
“That [assessment was] about an eight-month long process, and in that process, we ended up focusing on inclusion of Jewish young adults with disabilities or neurodiversity. [We] recognized that the D.C. area is home to many innovative and cutting-edge initiatives and organizations that are serving young Jewish adults, meeting them where they are, and they hadn’t yet thought about disability inclusion,” Polsky said.
Polsky added that while many organizations recognized the importance of improving inclusion and wanted to begin the improvement process, many didn’t know where or how to start.
Lisa Handelman, the director of inclusion and belonging at the Federation, said inclusion has been a priority for the Federation and has been improving in the D.C. Jewish community for years.
Handelman said the development of inclusion has taken place in preschools, day schools, camps and youth groups.
But now that those kids have become young adults, Handelman said the Matan study found an area of need for those young adults, and it gave the two organizations a shared mission to build a partnership.
“Working with the next generation of young adults is one of the strategic priorities here at Federation. So, it aligned beautifully, and that’s what we wanted to focus on first, and we decided to continue with Matan,” Handelman said.
The two organizations combined their efforts to create the Lieberman Fellowship, a program that Handelman called “a year of learning.”
The program will consist of a day-long training in disability inclusion followed by a roughly nine-month period where the participating organizations will be paired with a mentor via Matan and another day-long training at the end of the program.
Jennie Gates, the programs and partners manager at Matan, said the mentors are experts in disability inclusion and will work with the organizations to take what they learned in the trainings to create their inclusion goals and turn that into an actionable plan.
“One of the big things about disability inclusion is that no two individuals are really the same … so starting from the beginning, [we’re] being transparent about how a lot of the training is opening the professional’s eyes to the flexibility that’s required and the personalization and underlying that fact that when you plan for inclusion of folks with disabilities, you’re planning for the inclusion of anyone really, and it should benefit every single participant, not just those with disabilities,” Gates said.
This year’s cohort of nine participating local organizations will serve as a pilot program. The inaugural cohort of the fellowship was launched virtually on Sept. 5 and will have an in-person event at the Federation building for the participating organizations to connect on Nov. 14.
But despite launching the program in early September, most of their efforts have been spent recruiting organizations and learning more about the current landscape, according to Gates.
“[We’re] getting to know the landscape of the folks in the fellowship. It’s partially logistical in terms of making sure each participant has completed certain forms to give us the information we need to make sure that their needs are being met,” Gates said. “But then on the flip side, it’s also [a lot of] relationship building and understanding the particulars of each organization’s challenges and interests.”
Polsky said the Federation has been a vital partner in establishing the fellowship, helping connect Matan with local organizations that could benefit from the program and laying the groundwork to get it up and running in D.C.
“The Federation, to their credit, was really interested in not just having this community consultation and then just having the information [from the Matan study], but really showing people that they were going to move on what was found and really try to bridge some of these gaps in really concrete ways,” Polsky said.
Handelman said the fellowship was a step in the right direction for improving the options available for young adults with disabilities and making them feel valued wherever they may go, but it’s not the end of the work Federation is looking to accomplish.
“The long-term vision is from the littlest ones, our preschool kids, all the way up to our seniors, everybody should be included. The diversity of many voices makes us stronger, and this is part of that longer vision of being the type of community we are and want to be,” Handelman said.
