Centering the Voices of People with Disabilities in Physical Activity Research and Advocacy [Podcast Series]

Amy Rauworth is Chief Research and Innovation Officer at the Lakeshore Foundation.
She is a clinical exercise physiologist by training and serves as a fellow member of the Physical Activity Alliance Board.

“We work with a lot of other organizations in evidence-based approaches, because so many times for those of you who are in physical activity or health promotion, obesity prevention research areas, a lot of those studies really excluded people with disabilities. So we can't wait 17 years for that knowledge translation from that randomized controlled trial to hit the streets because the discrimination is real, the access barriers are real. And the data shows us that people with disabilities have greater issues with their health. So Lakeshore is trying to really do advocacy, research and activity to come at this from a collective impact and especially through partnerships because we couldn't do it without our partners.”

“However, I think that there's so much that we all can do to make inclusion and specifically disability inclusion really easy, that doesn't cost a lot and that really creates community, and that space and place where we all want to be.”

“And I think that's really important to know that it takes a collective movement, and we all have things that we can contribute. But there's times where I need to step up and step back, and I need to stop with whatever I think might be the best health intervention or the evidence-based approach. And I just listen, and like you said, always center the voices of people with disabilities.”

“But it used to be person first. Now it can be identity first, because people are owning that. So there's, there's campaigns that say hashtag, say the word, which is disability, no more made up words, like differently abled. Because in general, disability only has a bad stigma, generally, to people without disabilities. So people with disabilities understand that this is their lived experience and being healthy and having a disability is not an oxymoron.”

“Is the meeting environment accessible for someone with a physical disability who uses a wheelchair? Or does the stage have a ramp, all these types of things are things that we can all think about to make a more inclusive, welcoming environment, certainly.”

“But I'll use, for example, Lakeshore as a Paralympic and Olympic training site. We really understand the importance of sport and sport for change and sport for development, sport for diplomacy. We do exchanges with other countries, where people come here through the State Department and we learned from them, they learned from us. It really is this way to create opportunity and understand humanity, that we're all more alike than we are different.”

“But also there might be a lack of curb cuts or a lack of sidewalks. And so I would encourage folks the next time that they go out to be physically active on their trails or in their neighborhoods, to look at those built environments, and then to start to advocate to your City Council or to your Parks and Recs facility to create some maintenance components that may be needed or required. So everybody has a voice and they can use it.”

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