Recommended reading

Helpful Websites

For individuals with disabilities and their parents, caregivers, and families

Resources in Oregon

• Disability Rights Oregon
  Promoting and defending the rights of individuals with disabilities.

• FACT Oregon
  Empowering Oregon families experiencing disability in their pursuit of a whole life by expanding awareness, growing community, and equipping families.

• Multnomah County DD Services | Clackamas County DD Services
  Serving eligible adults and children with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

• Multnomah Early Childhood Program (MECP)
  Early intervention and childhood special education services to children birth to age five.

• Early Learning Multnomah
  Equity and opportunity for every child in Multnomah County

• Oregon Council on Developmental Disabilities
  Advancing social and policy change so that people with developmental disabilities, their families and communities may live, work, play, and learn together.

• Oregon Support Services Association
  Case management and in-home and community-based services for adult Oregonians with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

• ARC of Oregon
  Advocating for and beside children and adults with I/DD and their families.

• Community Developmental Disabilities Program (CDDP)
  Programs in Oregon organized by county.

• OHSU University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities
  Supporting people with disabilities throughout Oregon.

Resources in Washington

• Disability Rights Washington
  Promoting and defending the rights of individuals with disabilities.

• ARC of Washington
  Advocating for and beside children and adults with I/DD and their families.

Other resources for individuals and their families

• CAST: Center for Applied Special Technology
  Busting the barriers to learning that millions of people experience every day.

• David Pitonyak
  Behavioral specialist, Imagine consulting practice

• Broadreach Training and Resources
  Helping disabled people and their families live rich and meaningful lives in their communities.

• Inclusion Press
  Resource materials

• Wrightslaw
  Reliable information about special education law, and advocacy for children with disabilities

• Peak Parent Center
  Training, information and technical assistance to equip families of children birth through twenty-six including all disabilities with strategies to advocate successfully for their children

• Disability is Natural
  The Website Resource Page on Kathie Snow's website includes an extensive list of websites ranging in topic from education to employment to travel and more

• Think college National
  National initiative dedicated to developing, expanding, and improving research and practice in inclusive higher education for students with I/DD'.

• Community Vision
  Provides services, education, and advocacy to ensure that people with disabilities direct their own lives.

• Kids Together Inc.
  Information and resources for children and adults with disabilities.

• Council of Parent Attorneys & Advocates (COPAA)
  COPAA’s mission is to protect and enforce the legal and civil rights of students with disabilities and their families.

• Inclusion for ALL - Inclusive education is equity
  Grassroots network in Washington State and an intentional community of disabled individuals, parents and other caregivers of disabled individuals, professionals who work in education, and other community members who value social justice. Also on Facebook.

• Roots of Inclusion
  Non-profit advocacy organization focused on children and youth with disabilities and their families.

• Intentional-Transformation.com
  Mindfulness-based parent coaching for help navigating advocacy, IEP, etc

Helpful websites for educators & administrators

Inclusive Schooling
Create inclusive schools where all students flourish.

Ties Center
Helping educators and administrators create and support inclusive school communities.

The books listed here are recommendations from community members. It's important to us to only recommend resources that we are personally familiar with and would encourage friends or family members to read.

Recommended Books for Parents/Guardians

• Special Education: A Parent's Guide for Children's Success, by Michael Bailey

  The complex web of laws, regulations, personalities and stresses, combined with anxiety over raising a child with a disability, have made special education advocacy an impenetrable maze to many parents. This book presents the complexities of the process in a simple-to-understand way and offers practical tips, checklists and strategies on how to make the system work to insure the educational success of all children.

• Disability Is Natural: Revolutionary Common Sense for Raising Successful Children With Disabilities, by Kathie Snow

  In this user-friendly book, parents learn revolutionary common sense techniques for raising successful children with disabilities. When we recognize that disability is a natural part of the human experience, new attitudes lead to new actions for successful lives at home, in school and in communities.

Recommended Books for Family, Friends, Siblings, Etc

• The Sibling Slam Book: What It's Really Like To Have A Brother Or Sister With Special Needs, by Don Meyer

  A brutally honest look at the lives, experiences, and opinions of teenagers who have a sibling with special needs. Formatted like the slam books passed around in many schools, this one poses a series of 50 personal questions along the lines of: “What should we know about you? What do you tell your friends about your sib's disability?”

Recommended Books on Disability Culture

• Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability, by Paul K. Longmore

  This wide-ranging book shows why Paul Longmore is one of the most respected figures in disability studies today. Understanding disability as a major variety of human experience, he urges us to establish it as a category of social, political, and historical analysis in much the same way that race, gender, and class already have been.

• Too Late to Die Young: Nearly True Tales from a Life, by Harriet McBryde Johnson

  Harriet McBryde Johnson's witty and highly unconventional memoir opens with a lyrical meditation on death and ends with a bold and unsentimental sermon on pleasure. Born with a congenital neuromuscular disease, Johnson has never been able to walk, dress, or bathe without assistance.

• Accidents of Nature, by Harriet McBryde Johnson

  (Fiction) Coming-of-age novel set in the seventies about what it's like to live with a physical disability