In 2012, Amber Smock decided to apply for the Paul G. Hearne Emerging Leader Award after she was encouraged to apply by multiple people in her professional life, including Marca Bristow, the then-president and CEO of Access Living, and Andy Imparato, the then-President and CEO of AAPD. At the time, Smock was the Director of Advocacy at Access Living in Chicago, an organization she has now worked at for over 20 years.
“[The Hearne Award] brings you connection to people that you might want to work with,” she said. “I think that was the biggest reason why I applied for the Hearne Award. It was encouragement, but also it was an opportunity for connection.”
Smock said that winning the award in 2012 for her community organizing was very validating and affirming, especially since that work isn’t broadly recognized and rarely funded.
“I feel like my role [in the disability rights movement] right now is very much about building again, building capacity and building people’s ability to figure out what it means to do impactful advocacy work and build meaningful partnerships and get through difficult conversations,” she said.
She applied with the intention of creating an opportunity for the disability community to talk more about the importance of community organizing, especially in the years following the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
“There was an enormous amount of community organizing that went on to get the ADA passed, but it felt like in 2012 things were changing again,” she said. “People were building a different framework for how we live our lives as people with disabilities through disability justice and other means.”
“It felt like there was an opportunity to bring in more people and bring in more new people who hadn’t been involved in disability before, so I wanted the Hearne Award to be an opportunity to talk more about that,” she continued.
Deaf people such as herself working in centers for independent living were “a bit of a unicorn,” Smock said, noting that Deaf people tend to opt for Deaf-specific spaces rather than cross-disability ones due to some Deaf advocates believing that Deafness isn’t a disability and some disability advocates believing that Deaf inclusion is challenging or expensive. However, Smock sees value in cross-disability work and integration, and believes that Deaf leadership and inclusion can bring joy and diverse communication perspectives.
“I’m not just a policy advocate or an organizer or person with a disability or Deaf person. I am all of these things combined, and that can be a pretty powerful combination. So the Hearne Award felt like it was really affirming a cross disability approach rather than a siloed approach,” she said.
Smock’s work touches on all three of the themes the American Association of People with Disabilities (AAPD) has adopted for its convening to celebrate 25 years of the Hearne Award: bold ideas, connecting communities, and lasting change. For example, Smock is a part of a professional development cohort-style leadership pipeline for disabled professionals in Chicago called Disability Lead. Through mentorship and connections fostered through this network, she and her mentee advocated for disability and hospice care for incarcerated people, which led to the passage of a bill to start tracking and monitoring hospice programs in Illinois prisons.
“Who thinks about hospice and disability? Well, I do, but how [do] you make the change? You connect people,” she said. “These folks are going to keep working together, and that is going to create lasting change of some kind…I think the Hearne Award is designed to recognize that kind of ability.”
In reflecting on AAPD’s 30th anniversary, Smock said that AAPD deserves a lot of credit for its capacity building and leadership. She emphasized the importance of listening to marginalized people, especially following the effects of the pandemic and the current presidential administration.
“My advice is about exposure. Learn about people and ways of life that are not yours. Understand how to build connections across that, because it’s really what’s going to save us in the end,” she said.