Two Northeast Ohio organizations that support residents with developmental disabilities made groundbreaking appointments to their boards this week.
Middleburg Heights resident Sara Steimle will be the first person with a developmental disability to serve as a board member for the Cuyahoga County Board of Developmental Disabilities.
"I feel truly blessed and truly honored and I just know that this is such an impactful thing and is such a big thing," Steimle said. "I'm not only the voice for me, but I'm the voice for so many others that we serve, you know, at the board of developmental disabilities."
Steimle, who has cerebral palsy, spent much of her life in spaces that advocated for people with disabilities, like Youth Challenge a peer-to-peer adaptive sport and recreation organization for children with disabilities.
She now works with Youth Challenge full time, serves on Cuyahoga County's Advisory Committee for Persons with Disabilities and is chair of the Disabilities/Mental Health and Inclusive Healthcare subcommittees.
"I just kind of latched on to volunteering and that's actually," Steimle said. "I think, the big reason why I have gotten so involved in the disability community was just because I looked for opportunities, whether big or small, where I could give back to my community."
Nearly 30% of Cuyahoga County residents have a disability, Cuyahoga DD CEO Amber Gibbs said. Cuyahoga DD serves approximately 15,000 people with developmental disabilities each year though services that empower them to live, work and recreate in the county.
Board appointments like this one help ensure policies and programs benefit the disabled community, Steimle said.
"When you have a person with a disability on a committee, or on something like that, you're able to get a different perspective of lived experience," she said, "rather than just ... by the book, or rather than just something that you heard."
Stark County Board of Developmental Disabilities made its own groundbreaking appointment after swearing in Canton resident Crystal Waters Tuesday.
Waters, who has Spina Bifida, is an author and community volunteer. She is the first person with a developmental disability to serve on Stark County’s board.
"It's really important to me to give a voice to people that are in wheelchairs or have various disabilities," Waters said "because people act like or seem like you're not capable of living your life. Or doing a job just because you're in a wheelchair or have difficulty walking or talking."
Her appointment, along with Steimle's appointment in Cuyahoga County, will help the agencies understand their clients’ lived experiences, Waters said.
"To give a voice to the programming that we need is very important," she said. "It's important to have people who use these services on boards because we know firsthand about what we need."
The appointments come after an amendment to the Ohio Revised Code requiring the appointment of at least one person with developmental disabilities to all county boards of developmental disabilities by July 1, 2025.
Though the appointment fulfills the state's requirement, Amber Gibbs, CEO of Cuyahoga DD said the board was long aware of the value of input from the people they serve.
"We really have been working on helping individuals with disabilities become advocates and leaders in the community," Gibbs said. "We've been sort of working on this for several years, getting ready to find someone to be on our board as soon as we had a board appointment open."
Waters says she is excited for the opportunity to advocate for her community, and hopes more boards will offer residents with disabilities seats at the table.
For individuals with developmental disabilities, Waters says to never stop advocating for themselves, and their community.
"Don't let your disability stand in your way of pursuing your dreams and speaking out about your ideas or opinions," she said.
Though she is proud and excited of the appointments made so far, Gibbs said she hopes representation like this will soon become the norm.
"It's very exciting to be the first person on a board with a developmental disability," Gibbs said, "but I think that the most exciting thing is really that in several years we're going to look back at this and it's going to be so typical and so normal ... for people that we can barely remember a time when there had to be a first person."
