Sabrina-Marie Wilson founded Helping to Encourage Abilities and Recognizing Talents (HEART) as a junior high student to promote community engagement among young people with disabilities in the Washington, D.C. region. She received the inaugural American Association of People with Disabilities’ (AAPD) Paul G. Hearne Emerging Leaders Award in 2000 to honor her work.
HEART focuses on creating opportunities for young people with disabilities to engage in community service. When Wilson started HEART, she was a teen spending significant time in the hospital. HEART created a space for community service for Wilson and other tweens, teens, and young adults facing serious health issues and disabilities.
“The organization was a support group that started out at the hospital scene, because we always talked about how the treatments we were getting would take away from the socialization of being a kid. I grew up in the hospital system and I got to meet a lot of people there. And I said, why not on our days off, why don’t we do stuff in the community?” she said.
The young people with disabilities who participated in HEART volunteered at DC area homeless shelters and women’s shelters. They would often entertain the children at the shelters while their mothers had counseling sessions and other appointments and gather gifts for children for Christmas and Valentines Day.
Wilson went on to attend college at Howard University and continued to lead the group, becoming deeply involved in the local DC community and the DC disability community. What started as a way to have peer support and pass time together quickly became much more meaningful.
“During the time that I started [HEART], I was having struggles with the positivity of disability, because I’d been losing friends all that time, and I needed a different focus. That gave me the fight in the 90s to want to keep going,” Wilson said.
Though these terms had not been coined at the time, HEART turned away from the charitable model of disability, which assumes that people with disability need charity and do not have anything to offer their community or others in return. Instead, HEART embodies the core disability community principle of interdependence: the notion that care is not one-way, and individuals who receive support also have support to give. With interdependence, we all rely on and support one another.
“[Having a disability] gets to be redundant with the treatments and stuff. But then I’d see people who would have issues far more serious than me, so it kind of balances your mind and says, Okay, let me do something positive today. Let me try to do something that will help make somebody smile,” she continued.
When Wilson submitted her application for the Hearne Award, she had little knowledge of AAPD and was new to the disability rights movement, though she remembered hearing Hearne speak to a group of students about high school matriculation a few years earlier. She said that receiving the Hearne Award helped her realize the importance of the work she was doing through HEART and encouraged her to engage more deeply with the disability community
“It actually reinforced a purpose, to be able to get out, not only to help the in-the-Beltway disability community, but to go out to the broader disability community,” she said.
When Wilson was in college, she met AAPD co-founder Sylvia Walker, who taught her about the disability rights movement and became an important mentor to her. Through her work with Walker, Wilson spent time with many of the leaders who led our community through the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), such as AAPD co-founder Justin Dart, Jr., who was one of Wilson’s other mentors.
Walker, like her fellow co-founder Paul Hearne, cared deeply about mentorship and creating opportunities for young disabled people. The first time Wilson met Dr. Walker for lunch, Dr. Walker brought her to an event with appointees in the federal government, and immediately had Wilson introduce senior leaders in government as speakers.
Speaking about Walker’s role in her life, Wilson said, “She realized maybe a talent in me I didn’t know I had.”
“I think if I had not had that mentorship to keep me grounded, I don’t know where I’d be. It was a comfort to have her. It was great to see the stuff she was able to do, and she introduced me to a world of other people who were doing some awesome stuff,” she said.
Wilson builds upon her mentors’ work and promotes community and service in all that she does. Having witnessed the bipartisan nature of the passage of the ADA, Wilson’s current focus is on promoting civic engagement, ranging from voting and electoral engagement to local letter-writing campaigns that focus on getting a specific road paved in a community.
“We try to do the civic side of what is going on in a community or region. We try to teach people, regardless of age, just how to engage civically, how to work with people in their region or communities,” she said.
Dana Jackson, a recent retiree from the Department of Justice Disability Rights section, praised Wilson’s long history of serving as an advocate for disability rights.
“She worked really hard at HEART to make that organization thrive, and I think with all her interviews and as a media person, she’s really had a voice out there,” he said.
In addition to continuing to run HEART, Wilson is also an author, public speaker, and the host of an iHeartRadio podcast called Building Abundant Success!! With Sabrina-Marie. Her media, live events, writing, and speaking work have helped grow her platform and reach a significantly larger national and international audience.
“As I became an author, I got to be able to speak at different places. And if I was able to bring in a speaker or whatever from Tortola or God knows where, Canada, it helped me be able to reach out even more over the airwaves, as well as physically,” Wilson said.
Reflecting on the current moment, Wilson hopes the disability community focuses on building community beyond online spaces and continues to work together across differences to advance common goals. Ultimately, Wilson encourages disabled people to do what HEART created opportunities for her and her peers to do: connect with one another, lean on one another, and work together to make positive change.
“I think there needs also to be a bit more bonding between the different groups. Not that we all have to do the same thing, but if we’re going through what we’re going through now, we will need each other,” Wilson concluded.