Disability Integration Volunteers: Key To Equitable Care During Disaster Response

By Edgar Zuniga

All an elderly resident wanted, in one of our Red Cross shelters in Eastern Kentucky, was a talking watch.

“I found him one,” said Angela Smith, Red Cross Volunteer Divisional Advisor for Disability Integration. “Most people wouldn’t understand what the value of that is, but for someone who is visually impaired that could change their whole day. They can tell the time, plan out their day, it also helps people around them to know they are visually impaired.” 

Angela, Red Cross Volunteer Divisional Advisor for Disability Integration.

Disability Integration focuses on ensuring that every shelter meets access and functional needs. Volunteers like Angela, deployed as the disability integration chief to the Kentucky floods, ensure that we are providing services needed, all in accordance to the Americans with Disabilities Act. “If you need a prosthetic leg, a specific kind of wheelchair, if you need language interpreting, if you are hard of hearing or deaf, it is our job to provide you with an interpreter,” Angela said.  

Disability Integration collaborates with the different Red Cross disaster services, from mass care to mental health, and collaborates with community partners. “I call it interprofessional collaboration because everyone works together,” said Linda Connelly, a disability integration volunteer from Florida, also deployed to Kentucky.

“Unless we all work together, the client won’t get what they need, we can’t work in silos.”  

One such example, Linda said, was when she helped locate a bariatric bed for someone staying in a shelter, through Bluegrass Care Navigators, a local medical group practice. The bed was necessary not only for the comfort of the individual, but to ensure he would not develop pressure injuries, worsen skin breakdown, or just fall to the ground. “I think he felt dignified that we cared enough to make him our mission,” Linda said. “If you just help one person every day, that is one more person who has dignity and has what they need.” 

That’s what Bobby Sullivan, a Kentucky disability integration volunteer, did, Angela interjected. Bobby died in late July, but his work in Kentucky set the stage for equitable care in the state during the Kentucky floods response. “I’d like for him to be remembered as a caring, kind and devoted person to the role of disability integration.”  

It’s that devotion to dignity and self-determination, the right of all people to control and direct their own lives, that is at the heart of everything disability integration volunteers do. “Our job is to mitigate access and equity challenges to make sure that everyone is treated the same,” Angela said. “What disability integration does is take care of the whole community.” 

Learn more about volunteering with the Red Cross at redcross.org/volunteer.