Vision
Individuals of all ages and abilities will have a fair and just opportunity to live a healthy and meaningful life in the community.
About the Center
Mission
The Center for Health Equity serves as a catalyst for achieving the highest level of health for people with disabilities through research, education, and service by working to eliminate avoidable and unfair differences in health and health care.
Core Values
Our core values help determine what we do and how we do it.
We respect and celebrate diverse backgrounds, identities, and perspectives.
We value a social justice and human rights approach to one’s full health so that individuals with disabilities will be able to lead healthy and meaningful lives.
We see persons with disabilities as contributing and valued citizens whose voices count.
We see disability itself not as a personal quality but as an interaction between an individual and his/her environment.* This leads us to focus not on persons, but on disabling environments, including human-built, social, policy, and attitudinal environments.
We believe partnering with people with disabilities and their families is critical in all aspects of our work, including research, because they have lived experience in challenges we aim to address.
We believe collaboration with stakeholders in multiple sectors is essential in achieving health equity for and among people with disabilities given a wide variety of factors affecting one’s health.
We value engaging communities/neighborhoods in achieving health equity because environment has considerable impact on health.
We believe people with disabilities can lead a self-determined life through community membership, civic engagement, reciprocal relationships and supported decision-making.
Footnote: *We adopt a model and concept of disability by the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. In this framework, disability is a product of an interaction between health conditions and contextual factors: personal and environmental factors. Thus, disability is associated not only with underlying health conditions and but also with personal and environmental factors.