Anne Fracht Receives Career Achievement Award

On April 3rd, HPOD's Self-Advocacy Associate, Anne Fracht, was honored with a career achievement award from the Massachusetts chapter of Association of People Supporting EmploymentFirst (APSE)—a national, non-profit membership organization dedicated to promoting competitive integrated employment for persons with disabilities. “Employment First” is a framework for emphasizing that state-sponsored employment-related services should strive to help persons with disabilities secure real jobs, real wages, and real opportunities for professional advancement in work settings where individuals with disabilities work alongside their peers without disabilities.

At the award ceremony, Fracht reflected on the different jobs she has had over her 28-year career of advocacy. In a society where resource and income restrictions make it difficult for many persons with disabilities to work at all, she has had her share of under-inclusive work experiences. Her first experiences were in sheltered workshops--segregated settings for workers with disabilities where they are often paid subminimum wages. Later, she found work at non-profit agencies providing services to persons with disabilities like herself. 

"I have worked in some places where I had to learn to advocate for myself and others. While these places have made me a stronger advocate, those skills came at a cost. I have worked in other places where I have enjoyed facilitating self-advocacy groups. While I found those experiences rewarding, as I learned more, I eventually felt undervalued as a worker."   

It was not until she began working at HPOD that she felt really inlcuded.

"What I’ve come to learn is that a real job is where you are included with everyone, not just people with other disabilities. I have finally found this. I now have a job where I’m helping people be part of research, not just treated as statistics. I feel like I’m part of a team and that what I bring to the table is unique and valuable. It makes a difference when your colleagues really care about you as a person and not just as a worker. And so it’s kinda funny, but the best kinds of workplaces are ones where you’re treated as much more than just a worker. Because I am."

At HPOD, Fracht has applied her unique talents and insights across an array of programming areas. For example, Fracht brings her decades of self-advocacy experience to bear in HPOD’s “self-advocates in research” initiative. This effort seeks to correct the historical exclusion of persons with intellectual disabilities from scientific research through participatory research methodologies that bring persons with intellectual disabilities together with other researchers to design and execute studies on issues important to them. For example, Fracht was part of a team that published one of the only inclusive studies of the experiences of group home residents with intellectual disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Fracht has also played a critical role in HPOD’s capacity-building efforts to empower Massachusetts self-advocates to explore and expand access to alternatives to guardianship such as supported decision-making. They formed a self-advocate-led task force in 2017 as part of a grassroots effort to create a space for self-advocates to inform themselves about supported decision-making after learning about other organizations’ plans to file a bill in the state legislature. The task force used inclusive research methods to inform the development of Easy Read tools for making supported decision-making agreements. The task force then put these tools into action in a novel peer-to-peer pilot program where self-advocates helped someone to make her own agreement. Fracht ascribes this innovation to the leadership role self-advocates have had in this effort:

“In my view, if Massachusetts, or any other place, really wants its supported decision-making laws, policies, and programs to follow the spirit of ‘nothing about us without us,’ then it is essential that self-advocates are not just included but also play a leading role. While supported decision-making, if implemented the right way, can be a wonderful tool to help people make their own decisions with support, if self-advocates do not lead the way, then it will ultimately fail to deliver on its promise.”

Finally, Fracht plays a key role in HPOD’s ongoing efforts to ensure the views and lived experiences of persons with intellectual disabilities in Harvard classrooms, by participating as a guest lecturer in a variety of curricular offerings together with HPOD’s co-founders, Professors Bill Alford and Michael Stein, and HPOD’s Director of Advocacy Initiatives, Hezzy Smith. She has used her personal experiences, as well as her deep knowledge of her peers’ experiences, to help describe for students how too often the very structures designed to serve and support persons with intellectual disabilities in fact treat them as mere numbers or pieces of paper. In this way, she is both working to imbue students’ understandings of law and public policy with their real-world effects on the lives of a historically marginalized group and also helping to ensure that tomorrow’s leaders take to heart the “nothing about us without us” imperative advanced by the global disability rights movement.