Joe Bravo: Longtime ILC Chief Still Has
Passion for Job
By Kathi Wolfe
(This is one in an ongoing series of interviews that
Independence Today is conducting with leaders in the independent living
movement.)
Joe Bravo's life changed in a flash. One
minute, the 12-year-old was riding his bike in the Bronx, the New York City
borough where he grew up. The next minute, someone horsing around with a rifle
shot him from a rooftop. As a result, Bravo's spinal cord was injured, and he
became a wheelchair-using paraplegic.
Today, Bravo, now 53, is executive
director of the Westchester Independent Living Center in White Plains, N.Y.
Bravo, who came to the Center in 1981, is believed to have held the position
longer than any other independent living center (ILC) director in New York
state - perhaps even in the country.
 |
| Joe Bravo presenting Senator L. Vincent Leibell, III
an award for: "Exemplary Service to People with Disabilities Award" at a ribbon
cutting ceremony on October, 2008. Courtesy of Rita Casey. |
During a lengthy telephone interview,
Bravo said there is a "tremendous turnover (among ILC executive directors)
either from burnout, or they decided to go into government."
A lot of ILC executive directors or staff
members decide that they're better off taking jobs in the private sector or
government because "it's a lot easier," he said. "They probably get paid more -
which is always an incentive at some point in your life."
During a wide-ranging conversation, Bravo
related what he does to avoid burnout, how he combines being a jock and a
disability advocate, and why he remains hopeful despite the bad economy and the
disability rights battles that remain to be fought.
Though he began his involvement with
disability advocacy in the late 1970s, Bravo, like many people with
disabilities of his generation, had little awareness of disability rights when
he was growing up. (The Education for All Handicapped Children Act didn't
become law until 1975, and the "504 regulations" of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act
weren't signed until 1977.)
After his injury as a youngster, Bravo
spent seven months in rehab and then finished elementary school in a special
education class. "It was called a 'health' class," Bravo said. "Junior high was
pretty much a segregated class. It wasn't until high school (that) there was a
lot more conversation about integrated classrooms. All the teens with
disabilities were in homeroom together, but after that they separated and went
into integrated classrooms."
Bravo attended Theodore Roosevelt High
School, "the only accessible high school in the Bronx that my parents or I
(were) aware of," Bravo said. "It was an old school, but they had renovated it
and put in an elevator."
That elevator gave him access to all the
floors, and there were ramps to get into and out of the building. Despite that,
however, "it was very difficult (interacting with non-disabled classmates). It
was new to see disabled kids being mainstreamed (then) and being around the
other kids. It was not the most comfortable thing - the way we were
treated."
Looking back, Bravo took some
responsibility for that. "You're young, you're insecure - you just got this
disability, so you're not exactly the most outgoing person either."
Still, Bravo enjoyed school. "I didn't
have any consciousness (of the disability rights movement). I was just happy,
after rehab and several summers in the hospital, that the yellow school bus was
coming to pick me up and take me someplace. I had no consciousness that I had a
right to (go to school) or that somebody (by excluding him from social
interactions) might be doing me wrong."
While in rehab, Bravo had chatted with a
few others with spinal-cord injuries, but in high school, he rarely encountered
people with disabilities. That soon changed.
"My sister ran across an ad in the paper
that they were recruiting disabled guys for a wheelchair basketball team. She
knew I was always sports-minded and liked to watch sports." Bravo went to the
practice and met a bunch of Vietnam veterans playing wheelchair sports. "I got
hooked. I've played sports ever since."
While wheelchair basketball remains his
greatest passion, Bravo has participated in a myriad of sports, from tennis to
track and field. "I'm a believer in trying all the sports ... just to see what
I would enjoy."
After high school, Bravo enrolled at Long
Island University's Brooklyn campus, where he majored in political science. "In
those days, it was one of the three accessible colleges (in New York)." The
others were Hofstra University and Hunter College.
While in college, he began reading about
the emerging disability rights movement, "particularly about some of the stuff
that (the late disability rights advocate) Ed Roberts was doing."
And he heard about renowned disability
rights leader Judith Heumann, who was then in New York. "She had gone through
my college. (I) knew that she was in the midst of suing the board of education
in New York City ... because at that time she wasn't allowed to teach because
she was disabled."
Information about the New York advocacy
group Disabled in Action was filtering down to him, Bravo said. "I was ... on
the fringe of that. I was a little younger than the people who were doing
that."
In his senior year at LIU, Bravo met some
veterans with disabilities when he was playing sports. They introduced him to
people connected with the Eastern Paralyzed Veterans Association, now called
the United Spinal Association, and he was hired about six months after his
graduation, in late 1978.
But Bravo, who wed his girlfriend, Nadine,
the following year ("I'm still married to the same woman."), left his job as
EPVA's advocacy director after two and a half years. "A lot of their emphasis
was veterans' issues. I'm not a veteran. So my interests were going
elsewhere."
He worked for about a year and a half for
the Sullivan County (N.Y.) personnel office before "Pat (Figueroa, disability
rights advocate and publisher of Independence Today) called and said
'independent living centers are springing up in New York state. You might be
interested in applying,'" Bravo said.
Bravo's only previous exposure to
independent living had been when he'd served as a volunteer part-time peer
counselor with the Center for Independence of the Disabled in New York. (At the
time, CIDNY and EPVA were located in the same building.) "They'd call me in if
they had a paraplegic that they wanted me to talk to," he said. "I thought I
had something to share with some disabled people."
Figueroa mentioned that the Westchester
Independent Living Center was looking for a service coordinator and an
executive director. Bravo applied for the latter job but landed the service
coordinator post. When the newly hired executive director resigned for health
reasons, however, Bravo was hired in that post. "That was what started me on
this 30-year endeavor of independent living."
The center started out providing peer
counseling and other core services. Then "we started (asking), 'What about
client assistance services?' - working to help them get what they can out of VR
(vocational rehabilitation services)."
Starting new endeavors at the center has
always excited him, "because if it was always the same things, I would have
burned out by now," Bravo said. "I'm not the most patient person that can just
go along with things. I like stirring the pot and doing different things."
Though he likes diverse programming, he
has never wanted his center to get too big. "It's not that my program is one of
those 20-million-dollar IL centers. I've never wanted that ... I've always kept
it ... what it was supposed to be: very grassroots-oriented."
This year his center's budget will be
about $2.5 million, "which I think is plenty big for what I want to do," Bravo
said. "It has grown from that first year, where I think we had a $50,000
expenditure."
Though he doesn't devalue centers with
huge budgets ("They have a different vision of what needs to be done in their
communities, and I respect that."), Bravo worries that the grassroots values of
the independent living movement can be lost when ILC programs become too
large.
"There's the concern that the bigger you
become, the more traditional you become because you're taking on funding that's
still based on a traditional medical model.
"The bigger you get, the bigger management
you need. If you're a 15- to 20-million-dollar program, all of a sudden it
becomes driven by all that money and all that it represents."
Whenever you get money, you have to do
reporting - you have to be accountable to funding sources, Bravo said. "You got
to have that infrastructure - audits - all of that."
Though he's a member of the National
Council of Independent Living and has served on NCIL's board of directors, he
has chosen to focus his energies on the New York state independent living
scene. "There was so much that we needed and still need to do just in my state
that I always thought that's where my interests lie."
Unlike many athletes with disabilities,
Bravo feels a deep connection with the disability rights movement. The same
skills that he uses in sports help him navigate the challenges of the
independent living movement, he said. "It's the same aggressiveness that I find
on the basketball court - banging chairs with people who are much bigger and
faster than me - that keep me doing IL because you always see the next
challenge."
When you're involved in sports, there's
nothing that you feel you can't do for yourself, Bravo said. "You feel like
you're really not all disabled, even though you are. Your mind is saying to
you. 'I can do whatever I feel like doing. So why ... should I be ... fighting
for (disability) rights?'"
Bravo is greatly concerned with the effect
the national economic crisis will have on people with disabilities and
independent living centers. Small independent living programs "could be in
trouble nationwide" due to budget cuts, he said. And programs such as Medicare
and Medicaid could be cut, "even though it won't be called a cut."
With "able-bodied people," some of whom
are highly skilled, being laid off from jobs across the board, "are you going
to hire someone with a disability just out of college who doesn't have much
experience?" Bravo asked.
"We've got some issues that we want to
fight for, but we may have to be in survival mode for the next six years."
Though he foresees a struggle, Bravo
remains an optimist concerning people with disabilities. "We have to see the
glass as half full," he said.
Kathi Wolfe is a Washington, D.C. -
area writer. She writes frequently about disability issues. |
