Networking Reception

Welcome & Event Overview

Keynote – Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke

Award Presentation

Acceptance Remarks

Honoree Toast

Bob Dinerstein Retirement Recognition

Closing Remarks

started self-advocating at the age of 18 and became very involved in the self-advocacy movement. Bernard is the current president of Self Advocates Becoming Empowered (SABE). He has been a member of several advisory committees, including Self Advocacy Resource & Technical Assistance Center (SARTAC), the Board of Georgia Advocacy Office (GAO), the Arc of Georgia, the Atlanta Housing Authority, and the MARTA transportation system in Atlanta. He works as a DJ and is looking forward to resuming his business in transportation so that everyone can have access to their community.

is the Attorney and Program Manager at The Arc of the United States. He has worked in poverty law for over ten years. He is a graduate of Penn State University and Georgetown Law. He began his career as a teacher working with students who had intellectual and developmental disabilities in Miami, Florida. Seeing students arrested at school inspired him to pursue a legal education. He has worked predominantly in justice reform policies and programmatic impact work.

is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. In this role, she leads the Justice Department’s federal civil rights enforcement and works to uphold the civil and constitutional rights of all people who live in America. Assistant Attorney General Clarke is a lifelong civil rights lawyer who has spent her entire career in public service.

Assistant Attorney General Clarke began her career as a trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division through the Department of Justice’s Honors Program. In 2006, she joined the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, where she helped lead the organization’s work in the areas of voting rights and election law. In 2011, she was named the head of the Civil Rights Bureau for the New York State Attorney General’s Office. Under her leadership, the Bureau secured landmark agreements with banks to address unlawful redlining, employers to address barriers to reentry for people with criminal backgrounds, police departments on reforms to policies and practices, major retailers on racial profiling of consumers, landlords on discriminatory housing policies, school districts concerning issues relating to the school-to-prison pipeline and more.

In 2015, Ms. Clarke was named the president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Assistant Attorney General Clarke was born in Brooklyn, New York. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her J.D. from Columbia Law School.

has been a strong advocate for people with developmental disabilities for more than 20 years. He currently works as a Special Assistant to the Commissioner at the Office of Persons With Developmental Disabilities for the New York State. Chester grew up in western New York, attending school in Lockport and earning his associate degree from Gennessee Community College in Batavia. He is passionate about upholding the rights of people with disabilities everywhere. His goals are to leave things in a better place and be able to teach and mentor young people to be advocates for themselves and others.

practiced law at the Public Interest Law Center of Philadelphia from 1984 to 2009. She served as Director of Disability Projects from 1998 to 2009. She has conducted class action litigation to obtain community services for institutionalized persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Montana, California, Illinois and Tennessee. Her work as counsel for the Arc of Pennsylvania and the plaintiff class during the implementation phase of the consent decree in Halderman v. Pennhurst from 1986 through 1998 led to significant improvements in community service systems in Philadelphia and other counties. Ms. Gran represents special education students in administrative and judicial proceedings in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and other states, including the class action suit Gaskin v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, a case brought to enforce the least restrictive environment mandate of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that is now in the implementation phase. She is a currently a partner at Reisman Carolla Gran & Zuba LLP.

is a 29-year-old self-advocate who lives Canton, Massachusetts, where she is the Self-Advocate Content Expert at Mass Advocates Standing Strong. She is currently in school working on her GED, so she can go to college. She is also interested in photography, Spanish, music, writing, and filmmaking. Some words she uses to describe herself are: Bold, Adventurous, Driven, Free-Spirited, and Smart!

is a partner at Brown Goldstein & Levy and founder of Inclusivity Strategic Consulting. Eve has decades of experience implementing the Americans with Disabilities Act and other disability rights laws through consultation, technical assistance, training, guidance, and enforcement. She has served as a senior federal government official at the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, as the Director of District of Columbia Office of Disability Rights, at the Burton Blatt Institute, and in academia, nonprofit, and private practice. She also has experience helping entities go beyond compliance to include disability as part of their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. She is the co-author of a treatise and a casebook on the ADA. Recent highlights of her work include successfully suing the Commonwealth of Virginia for prohibiting schools from requiring peer masking surrounding students with disabilities like leukemia, advising Monroe County, Indiana on how to reform their mental health and criminal justice systems to avoid unnecessarily incarcerating people with disabilities, requiring several states to implement accessible absentee voting, and developing best practices for inclusion of students with disabilities in higher education.

is the Chief of Advocacy and Campaigns at Caring Across Generations. Before joining Caring Across, Nicole was Senior Director of Public Policy and Senior Executive Officer of State Advocacy at The Arc of the United States. Before coming to DC to work on Federal Advocacy and Organizing, Nicole served as Senior Policy Advisor and Manager of the Employment First Initiative in Illinois. Prior to that appointment, Nicole was the CEO/President of the Institute on Public Policy for People with Disabilities. Nicole is also an accomplished special education attorney.

Nicole leads and supports many coalitions to advance the priorities of care across generations, including the Care Can’t Wait Coalition, the Disability and Aging Collaborative and the Consortium for Constituents with Disabilities LTSS Taskforce. Nicole also chairs the Board for the Quality Trust for People with DIsabilities is a proud board member of the National Association of Direct Support Professionals (NADSP) and a member of the Presidents Committee on People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities. Nicole is most importantly a sibling to her brother Chris who is 33 and has autism and on the care team for her 90 year old grandma who has Parkinson’s.

has spent the last 29 years working with and for individuals who experience I/DD. She is currently the Executive Director of Total Living Concept in Kent, Washington. She is a passionate advocate for social change and equity for individuals who experience disabilities. Before moving to Washington, Jennifer worked in a variety of positions over 23 years at Jay Nolan Community Services, working to shut down congregate facilities and provide individualized supports in living, employment, and recreation. She is currently the President of the TASH Board of Directors. First and foremost Jennifer is a mother of 2 beautiful children and a wife to a loving partner.

is a Senior Policy Analyst in the National Health Law Program’s Washington, D.C. offices. His work at the National Health Law Program centers primarily on issues surrounding coverage and care for older adults and people with disabilities, including home and community-based services. He also works on Medicaid demonstrations and waivers, managed care quality and accountability, and health care affordability.

David has a Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a focus on immigration and public health policy. David’s dissertation work, an ethnography of cross-border tuberculosis control programs, investigated the design of a bi-national public health policy and access to care issues for low-income migrant populations at the U.S./Mecixo border.

As a medical anthropologist, David has researched and volunteered in a number of communities in which a high percentage of the population was medically underserved and did not speak English as a first language, further hampering their access to health care.

After receiving his doctorate, David spent a year living in eastern Ethiopia. In 2010-11, he taught courses on health and immigration at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, and in 2009-10, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. David received his A.B. in Anthropology from Princeton University.

As a Filipino American with developmental disabilities, Mathew McCollough is currently the Director for the District of Columbia Office of Disability Rights (ODR), the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) compliance office for the District Government. Mayor Muriel Bowser appointed Mr. McCollough as ODR Director on July 10, 2017. Previously, Mr. McCollough served as the Executive Director of the District of Columbia Developmental Disabilities Council, which promotes independence and equal opportunity for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Prior to assuming this position, he served as the Communications Manager for the DC Office of Disability Rights. Between 2002-08, he served as a Grants Manager and Trainer with the Association of University Centers on Disabilities and for the National Service Inclusion Project—a training and technical assistance provider that advocates on the behalf of individuals with disabilities to fully participate in service and civic-minded programs within their communities. Mr. McCollough’s professional career began at the United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, where he served as a Financial Assistant between 2000 and 2002.

In 2011, Mr. McCollough was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the United States Access Board, an independent Federal agency devoted to establishing accessibility standards that promote the full integration and participation of people with disabilities. In 2015, President Obama reappointed him to serve a second term on the U.S. Access Board. Additionally, Mr. McCollough has been elected or appointed to several commissions and boards with emphasis on health equity and human rights, including the Chair of the District of Columbia State Rehabilitation Council, Mid-Atlantic Regional Health Equity Council and the District of Columbia Commission on Human Rights. In 2016, he was elected Board President of the National Association of Councils on Developmental Disabilities, and this honor represents the first time in the Association’s history of electing a President with developmental disabilities. Mr. McCollough is honored to be serving a second term on the TASH Board of Directors, and his first term on the TASH Board took place between 2012 and 2015.

 has represented people with disabilities for more than twenty years. She first became involved in disability issues as Deputy Director of the Equal Employment and Public Accommodation Division of the New York City Human Rights Commission. She then worked as a staff attorney and later as Director of the Disability Law Center of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest. There, she was lead counsel in Jean D. v. Cuomo, which challenged the denial of fresh air and exercise to patients at state psychiatric centers.

Ms. Saideman moved to Miami in 1993, and she worked first as a staff attorney and then as a consultant for the Advocacy Center for Persons with Disabilities (now Disability Rights Florida). She was co-lead counsel in Brown v. Bush, which led to the closure of two state institutions for people with disabilities.

She is now a solo practitioner in Rhode Island, focusing primarily on disability rights, education law, health law, and employment law. In addition, she is an Adjunct Professor of Legal Writing at Roger Williams University School of Law. Recently, Ms. Saideman assisted the National Center for Law and Economic Justice and the Rhode Island ACLU on a lawsuit to require Rhode Island to process food stamp applications in a timely manner.

is a trilingual attorney, a proud sibling, and Director of Advocacy Initiatives. He’s responsible for much of HPOD’s self-advocacy programming. He has worked closely with self-advocacy and disabled peoples’ organizations both in the United States and abroad to advocate, research, and produce awareness-raising materials. His Spanish, English, and Bangla language materials have shaped disability rights strategic litigation and important decisions by national and regional courts, and his disability rights scholarship has appeared in collections published by Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, as well as both U.S. and international law reviews.

is president of Inclusion International and serves as treasurer for the International Disability Alliance. Sue served both terms of the Obama administration as deputy and acting assistant secretary for special education and rehabilitative services and was director of the National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research. She was appointed senior advisor in the same office in the Biden administration for 8 months in 2021-22. She was commissioner for developmental disabilities in the Clinton administration and has been executive director of the Kennedy Foundation and The Arc of the United States. Sue learned about disability from her middle son Charlie, who lived for 30 years with profound disabilities, was included in neighborhood schools, and always lived with his family and in the community. Sue was educated at the University of Chicago and holds an MBA from the University of Minnesota.

is co-founder and the executive director of the Gwinnett Parent Coalition to Dismantle the School-to-Prison Pipeline (Gwinnett SToPP). Gwinnett SToPP organizes students, parents, and community members to reverse the School to Prison Pipeline through public education and policy change advocacy. She also serves on the steering committee of the Education Civil Rights Alliance and the Gwinnett County Public Schools GEMS curriculum review committee. Marlyn has previously served as the Federal Strategies Co-Chair for the national Dignity in Schools Campaign (DSC). Other advisory roles have included the DSC steering committee, Gwinnett County Human Relations Commission, the advisory committee of the Child Trends Healthy School Environments Initiative. She is a recipient of the Black Voices for Black Justice Award and the ACLU of Georgia’s Georgia Civil Liberties Award for community activism. Marlyn advocates at the local, state, and national levels to impact education policies as they pertain to the school-to-prison pipeline.