Accessibility Needs to be Universal: A Chat with CANBC Founder Heather McCain

Heather McCain is the creator of www.canbc.org, a disability advocate website born out of need that offers workshops and support for those in the disability community and the disability Queer community. As Pride Month comes to an end for another year, it's good to raise awareness that people in LGBTQ community who identify as disabled have other concerns they often need to deal with.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Evan Kelly  0:04   So welcome back to DDA's Encouraging Abilities podcast. This is where we connect with advocates in the disability community, help tell their stories, raise disability awareness, and be a supporter and advocate for them as well. Now for those who don't know about DDA, we are a community living agency that serves Vancouver and Richmond. We support roughly 2000 clients with developmental disabilities and their families and have been doing so since 1952. That means it's our 70th anniversary this year. So today we are joined by Heather McCain, they are the founder of creating accessible neighborhoods or CAN for short, you can check out their website at canbc.org. They also run the chronically queer support group, which is a group designed to offer advocacy and support to people in the LGBTQ community who identify as disabled either physically or cognitively. Now, of course, June is pride month. So I feel it's a great time to talk to Heather about accessibility in our own neighborhoods, from the queer perspective here in the Lower Mainland. So welcome to the podcast. Heather. 

Heather McCain  1:07   Thanks for having me. 

Evan Kelly  1:08   Excellent. So tell me a little, just to tell the audience a little bit about yourself, just right off the top here.

Heather McCain  1:15   Sure. So I am disabled and neurodivergent. And I founded Creating Accessible Neighborhoods in 2005, after my own experiences with ableism and inaccessibility.

Evan Kelly  1:32   And do you know, I might be bouncing around your website a little bit because you just call you call yourself a crip doula. Can you expand on that?

Heather McCain  1:40   Absolutely. Crip doula is a disability justice term for someone who helps disabled people navigate our complex systems, whether that's government, medical, whatever, provide resources, support, and build communities. And it's a, it's a term that is given to people by community, and members of chronically queer gave this title to me. And out of all my titles are just the one I'm proudest of because it is people like myself that I have positively impacted who have given me this title.

Evan Kelly  2:18   So it's a well learned title. That sounds great. And so you started CAN or you know, it's a great acronym for a website, by the way, creating accessible neighborhoods. CAN, you started from your own experiences of ableism? Can you tell me, can you expand on that a little bit for us?

Heather McCain  2:36   So I use the power wheelchair at the time, and I was trying to get about my community. But where I lived in Maple Ridge, the bus came once an hour. And at least half of the time, the bus drivers would lie and say that the ramp was not operating, because they just didn't want to bother with someone in a wheelchair. And obviously, that made it very difficult to get around the community and very hard to find any kind of day when the buses only came once an hour. And I wrote letter after letter to TransLink with no response. And then someone kind of jokingly suggested to me that I should just start my own organization. And after another letter came back with no response, I thought, okay, well, at least look into it and started, CAN, I wrote the exact same letter, but this time was executive director underneath my name and got a response a week later.

Evan Kelly  3:30   Funny how that works sometimes, isn't it? 

Heather McCain  3:33   Yeah, it's not how the system should work, or what you should be required to have befor