Please Support ADA Watch/CDRJ!

"Together with our coalition partners, we work to protect and advance the rights and freedoms that allow people with all types of disabilities to live, learn, work and play in their own homes and communities." 

Disability-led and founded more than 25 years ago, ADA Watch and the Coalition for Disability Rights & Justice (CDRJ) work to amplify the many voices of the U.S. disability rights and justice movement. The Social Good Fund is our 501(c)(3) fiscal sponsor. 

                                   Our founding chair Justin Dart, Jr. with Yoshiko Dart and ADA Watch/CDRJ founder Jim Ward.
(Photo Credit: Matt Mendelsohn)

Disability rights icon Justin Dart, Jr.—widely recognized as the "Father of the ADA"—served as our founding chair. Since then, our National Advisory Council has brought together respected leaders and organizations across the disability, civil rights, human rights and social justice movements.

Our work includes producing and sharing vital news, commentary, and action alerts; supporting state cross-disability organizing; advancing national advocacy; convening strategic planning sessions; educating policymakers, media, and the public; and hosting high-visibility events promoting disability rights as fundamental human rights.

ADA Watch/CDRJ's Road To Freedom bust tour and mobile advocacy
campaign was cited as #10 in 35 years of ADA & Disability History 

On our award-winning Road to Freedom Bus Tour, we spent nearly two years traveling the country to build support for restoring the Americans with Disabilities Act—advocacy recognized in the Congressional Record upon passage of the ADA Amendments Act.

With the theme, "Keeping the Promise of the Americans with Disabilities Act," our bus and exhibit featured Tom Olin's renowned  photographic history of the ADA to illustrate Arlene Mayerson's "Movement Perspective of Disability Rights History." 

"The ADA owes its birthright not to any one person, or any few, but to the many thousands of people who make up the disability rights movement – people who have worked for years organizing and attending protests, licking envelopes, sending out alerts, drafting legislation, speaking, testifying, negotiating, lobbying, filing lawsuits, being arrested – doing whatever they could for a cause they believed in."  —Arlene Mayerson, DREDF's Past Directing Attorney 

ADA Watch/CDRJ convenes and mobilizes large coalitions, leads national campaigns, and has produced the Disability Rights Concert, featuring Grammy Award-winning artists, televised by Comcast as Congress debated restoring ADA protections.

At our first Disability Rights Concert, Sweet Honey in the Rock
founder Bernice Johnson Reagon declared that, "...laws like like t he
ADA need to be monitored, need to be supported, need
to be enforced, and need to be expanded where necessary."

(Photo Credit: Mark Sincevich)

Today—as disability rights protections, programs and our freedoms are routinely being rolled back—we continue that work while also building AMPLIFY: shared community-organizing and civic engagement infrastructure designed to strengthen distributed leadership at the national, state, and local levels. Like all our projects, we offer AMPLIFY within a generative rather than extractive framework, forgoing coalition partner dues, fees, paywalls and the like. 

Disability justice demands an interconnected ecosystem—one that links local lived experience directly to national policy decisions. Built to operate seamlessly under our partners’ own branding, AMPLIFY provides the shared infrastructure to bridge grassroots organizers with state and national advocacy organizations and coalitions, unifying diverse voices across every level of the movement. AMPLIFY, grounded in principles of Servant Leadership, is designed to outlast any single leader, organization, coalition, campaign, or moment.

Your gift will directly fund ADA Watch/CDRJ's ongoing advocacy, coalition-building, capacity-building best practices, as well as the development of AMPLIFY's shared community organizing infrastructure, connecting advocates and activists across movements.

During this time of division and dehumanization in our nation, your contribution will ensure that the lived experiences and the many voices of people with all types of disabilities shape the decisions that impact our lives.

ADA Watch/Coalition for Disability Rights & Justice 
601 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20004