Elijah Armstrong: The Heumann-Armstrong Award is, er, education award for students in the sixth grade and up, including all forms of higher education who have experienced and fought against ableism in education.

Each one of the six students gets a $1,000 monetary award and we shoot a video interview with them.

And the video interview is recorded and then illustrated by a group of disabled artists out of Colorado called Access Gallery.

FEMALE_1: It's a little bit of struggle in school because my disability is an invisible one and it's a pretty common one as well, so it's somewhat hard to distinguish, you know, trying to figure out exactly what I need going into this school year.

MALE_1: I have dreamy blue eyes, an infectious laugh, and a radiant smile.

FEMALE_2: Being autistic means I experience the world differently than my neurotypical peers FEMALE_3: Getting support from the Student Disability Services Office was impossible while I was an undergrad.

FEMALE_4: Trying not to absorb the ableism from the world.

And trying not to internalize those stereotypes about people with disabilities, and trying to keep myself from manifesting those stereotypes by internalizing them has been a struggle.

Elijah Armstrong: We don't really talk much about the experience of disabled students themselves.

So really to be able to center those narratives is something that's really important.

There are a lot of challenges that people with disabilities have that other students don't have financially, like costs for medicine, costs for transportation.

And also a lot of these students are actually taking on projects themselves that are pretty expensive.

So the Heumann-Armstrong Award is a way to compensate for a lot of the labor that's not seen or traditionally compensated, but labor that is at the same time very necessary for the movement.

I have been doing disability work for about a decade now.

I went to Penn State where I founded Equal Opportunities for Students.

I applied to an award from the American Association for People with Disabilities.

It comes with a $7,500 grant to run a project for people with disabilities.

I- I won in 2021 and I decided to partner with The Coelho Center.

So I've been working with them since 2021 to create Heumann-Armstrong Award, which is a scholarship for students with disabilities.

My initial goal was to work with Judy Heumann, who was the mother of Disability Rights Movement.

Judy loved the idea and really want to be a part of it, but she wanted to rename it the Heumann-Armstrong Awards that I would be a co-equal partner on it.

And that really spoke a lot to the person she was and the character she had in terms of uplifting younger voices in the disability movement.

Judy passed away on March 4th, which was, uh, just such a huge loss for me personally, not just as someone who I worked with frequently, but also I got to really over the last few years get to know her as a friend and we'd go out for dinner and drinks and she was just a really uplifting person.

Judy really cared deeply about uplifting people with disabilities, especially in the realm of education.

Judy Heumann: This increasing movement where people like yourself, Amy, uh, not only feel empowered but act empowered, and, you know, work with other people on campus and in the community to help people find their voice and speak their story.

Elijah Armstrong: She looked out for her people alive, um, and we'll- we'll all really miss her in the disability community.

We'll- we'll all miss her very deeply.

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