I’m Maurya West Meiers. I work at the World Bank Independent Evaluation Group as a Senior Evaluation Officer. I’m also coauthor of A Guide to Assessing Needs: Essential Tools for Collecting Information, Making Decisions, and Achieving Development Results (a free World Bank book).
My post today involves thinking about needs for our friends – or ourselves – who are disabled, elderly, or have other needs – when doing needs assessments and planning.
My introduction to disability planning came through meeting Disability Rights Advocate, Judy Heumann, who passed away this year. Some of you might know her from the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution, which was a 2021 Academy Award nominee. She was an advisor in my organization when I was younger, and my interactions were limited, but I supported some training that my team developed with her team on integrating disability thinking into monitoring and evaluation planning. I became aware, I’ll admit at a fairly superficial level, on a range of disability policy and planning matters. And I’m still learning. But it informed my work in many areas later in my career from giving input onto websites that my team was developing to make them more accessible, to providing feedback on infrastructure projects and thinking about ways to be more inclusive, to local developments in my neighborhood.
For those of you who work in community planning, especially around local infrastructure or building projects, there is much that you can do to plan with a disability lens in mind and, more specifically, through the Universal Design (UD) approach. The Centre for Excellence in Universal Design defines it this way.
Universal Design is the design and composition of an environment so that it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people regardless of their age, size, ability or disability. An environment (or any building, product, or service in that environment) should be designed to meet the needs of all people who wish to use it. This is not a special requirement, for the benefit of only a minority of the population. It is a fundamental condition of good design. If an environment is accessible, usable, convenient and a pleasure to use, everyone benefits. By considering the diverse needs and abilities of all throughout the design process, universal design creates products, services and environments that meet peoples’ needs. Simply put, universal design is good design.
– Centre for Excellence in Universal Design
A community leader with whom I have worked on local projects has done a lot to inform us about UD planning from the needs determination stage. A simple example: if a developer is planning a new building, it should be designed with the *main entrance* as accessible and for all building users regardless of age, disability or other factors. This would mean that there would not be a main door for some users with an accessible door for other users around the corner. The single main entrance would include such features as step-free entries, ramps, lever door handles, power door mechanisms, and wide doorways. As a result of the awareness strengthening by this community leader on UD, now when developers come before us to present plans, it’s become a norm for reviewers to refer to UD guidance and remind developers about the benefits of UD. And that’s a great thing.
Rad Resources
- GSA’s guidance on universal design
- The ADA National Network provides information, guidance, and training on how to implement the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in order to support the mission of the ADA to “assure equality of opportunity, full participation, independent living, and economic self-sufficiency for individuals with disabilities.”
The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Needs Assessment (NA) TIG Week with our colleagues in the NA AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our NA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org. aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.