Nicole Jorwic
speaker
68 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Nicole Jorwic’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Great to be here. Glad to be here.
That's the double. Get all the sweetness in there. It's almost like a cup, a morning cupcake. I like that. Nicole Jorwick. I am the chief program officer for Caring Across Generations, lifelong disability advocate. And I think my favorite would be probably Banana Nut.
All right.
Yeah. And for me, disability, I've been really lucky that disability has been a through line thread in my life. I have a brother who has autism. He's 35. But actually, before he was even born, his name's Chris. I'm sure I'll talk about him a lot because he's also my favorite Medicaid recipient.
But before he was even born, I was in the first included school district many decades ago in the first classroom in our school district where we had people with disabilities in our classroom, in our regular ed classroom. And so for me, the term disability integration and community integration is really something that I've been lucky to live at so many different phases of my life.
And the term integration is based in the Latin root integrare, which means to make whole. And for me, every part of my existence wouldn't have been whole without my friends and relatives and colleagues with disabilities.
Making my mom proud. You know, what can I say?
Thank you. Thank you.
Yeah, and it isn't always enough. And also part of why it does seem like it's so recent in time, and unfortunately it is, is because for so long, when you think about the history of the disability movement, I also am lucky to have learned a lot from people like Alice and others before me, is that people with disabilities were so often hidden, right? I'm not that old. I'm in my early 40s.
And I was in the first included school district. Right. My brother is 35 and he was the first student with autism included in our school district. And that's a very recent history. And that's because so often for cultural reasons and just lack medical reasons and the medical industry is saying that, you know, people should go into institutions until the 70s and 80s.
That's what parents were being told. So, so often people with disabilities were this unseen unheard at home if they were anywhere or warehouse and institutions. And that's part of why things like the ADA and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act really are relatively new in history because that integration piece is actually relatively new.
Extreme agreement, yeah.
Not a ton to add. Just really leaning in on, you know, special needs. I have like an earworm for it. If I hear it, it makes my skin crawl because there actually isn't anything special about being disabled. As Zoe said, it's a high percentage of of the human experience for a lot of our community members.
And the more that you get nervous about it or try to call it something else, the more it actually takes away from the reality of the existence of the person.
Yeah, we really don't. And the reality for the vast majority of disabled people is that they're relying on either an incredibly underpaid workforce or unpaid family caregivers. The direct care workforce that is paid for via Medicaid, which I know we're going to talk about in a little bit,
is historically has been underpaid, predominantly a workforce made up of women, predominantly women of color and immigrants, partially because of the makeup of the workforce and also the makeup of the people that are receiving care.
So disabled people and aging adults who, as we've already discussed, historically have not been part of policy conversations or sometimes part of society as a whole, you have a very underpaid workforce. And then you have over 105 million people who are providing some type of care.
So that's over 40% of the country that's providing some type of care because of the lack of government systems to do so. And that comes at a great financial cost. Per the National Partnership on Women and Families, $1 trillion of unpaid care is provided to the economy because of the lack of systems in place. That's impacting young people.
That's impacting disabled people who are also acting as caregivers. And that's also, you've kind of been hearing more in this, especially during the presidential campaign about sandwich generation caregivers. Oftentimes you're thinking about parent of a young child and Maybe somebody who's also helping to care for their older adults, but it takes on a lot more different looks.
It can look like me who is caring for a brother, an adult brother with disabilities and my aging grandparents. The longer the lifespan, the more sandwich generation caregivers that there are. And so it's not just a disability issue. It's a care issue when it comes to the systems that we need to create.
Showing 1–20 of 68 · page 1 of 4
Next →