Anjali Forber-Pratt was already an accomplished disability advocate, researcher, and Paralympic medalist when she received the American Association of People with Disabilities’ Paul G. Hearne Emerging Leaders Award in 2012. She has gone on to transform the field of disability research from both inside and outside the federal government.
One of Forber-Pratt’s first experiences with disability advocacy was filing a lawsuit against her high school for disability discrimination. She ended up settling the case in the spring of her senior year, but she knew her lawsuit would lead to lasting change.
“It was a long, extended battle and I knew that I personally wasn’t going to benefit from my own case, but I wanted to make it better for those coming up after me, and for other teachers and staff in the district, parents of kids with disabilities, of course other kids with disabilities as well, who would at one some point in time become high schoolers,” she said.
According to Bonnielin Swenor, Director of the Johns Hopkins Disability Health Research Center, “[Anjali’s] case made history, as it was among the first where punitive and compensatory damages were awarded under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in an educational setting.”
By the time Forber-Pratt received the Hearne Award, she had recently completed her PhD in Human Resource Education from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She credits the Hearne Award with helping validate her work.
“One of the cool things about being a Hearne awardee, just with the recognition from AAPD, was making it to the big leagues and sort of being among these other incredible leaders who are so gracious and so willing to also help lift up other Hearne awardees,” Forber-Pratt said.
“What for me, personally, it did was it helped to elevate a lot of the great leadership and work that I was doing to make it be recognized at a much larger scale than where I was at right after my first year finishing doctoral school,” she continued.
Forber-Pratt has been a pioneer in researching disability identity development. She taught at the University of Kansas and Vanderbilt University, where she ran a research lab that attracted students from many different colleges to work with her.
“I do feel like that I helped to put the field on the map, saying, ‘Hey, this is worthy to study,’ and the work that I did, have done, and continue to do, whether that’s literature reviews or empirical studies based on that work, developing and validating a measure on disability identity, my whole goal with that was for it to become its own field of study, and I feel like it actually does exist now, which is pretty cool,” she said.
Forber-Pratt sees parallels to how she benefited from the Hearne Award and her findings from her research on disability identity development.
“One of the key pieces that we’ve learned in disability identity development is the power of the connection to that broader disability community. I feel like that’s exactly what the Hearne award also did for me, both in terms of being encouraged to apply from other individuals, and then becoming an awardee and being among that big league,” she said.
Under the Biden administration, Forber-Pratt served as the Director of the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research (NIDILRR) within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. A key accomplishment from her time in government was chairing a disability data interagency working group that developed the first-ever federal evidence agenda on disability. A federal evidence agenda is a type of strategic plan that provides a roadmap for how the federal government can build and use evidence to answer questions about its programs, policies, and operations.
“In this current context, it remains to be seen in terms of how it will get used or adopted or implemented by others. But, I still think the accomplishment is noteworthy because we were having disability data and disability conversations with people and departments and agencies who were not previously thinking of those things. Even if it’s just that we planted the seed and that someday it’ll hopefully grow and blossom, I feel like that was particularly important work,” she said.
As a leader, Forber-Pratt has always worked to intentionally uplift marginalized voices.
“That has always been a real hallmark of when I was on faculty and then when I was leading NIDILRR, finding and creating those spaces to be able to lift up disabled voices, multiply marginalized disabled voices, those voices who, for whatever the reasons, are sometimes left out of key conversations, and I took it also as a responsibility and as a challenge to find newer voices as well,” she said.
Swenor explained Forber-Pratt’s significant impact on the disability community.
“Anjali is a pivotal figure in disability history. She has helped to shape and advance societal views of disability through her research, advocacy, and policymaking,” she said. “I hope that one day her story will be part of the lessons they learn in school, reminding future generations that lasting progress only comes when we have the courage to refuse injustice.”
After leaving NIDILRR, Forber-Pratt became the Director of Research at the American Association on Health & Disability. She reflected on her hopes for how the disability community can recover from the challenges of the current political environment.
“I think that we are in such a critical moment right now, both in our country and for the field where we’re seeing a lot of really unfortunate cutting of programs and services. But I also think that there’s going to be a hidden opportunity to help to rebuild some of these things in more intentional, inclusive ways,” she said.
“But to me, it’s going to be even more important that we are all at those tables to be active agents and playing those roles of that rebuilding,” Forber-Pratt concluded.