Living Independently

People with disabilities can face significant limitations on how they choose to live, work, and connect to their community. There are many apparent physical barriers to accessing goods and services, but there are also numerous invisible barriers. These are the socially-constructed obstacles that prevent people with disabilities from fully participating in our community. These include systemic discrimination and exclusion, and/or negative attitudes. All these barriers restrict their ability to live independently. People with disabilities are more likely to be unemployed, and the employment rate decreases steadily as the severity of disability increases. As a result, people with disabilities are also much more likely to live in poverty.

We aim to enable people with disabilities to improve their quality of life, to live independently, and to participate fully in their communities. We emphasize peer and group community-based programs and initiatives. These services address individual needs, and identify how to meet service gaps, needs, or populations not well-served by existing programs. We also support projects that amplify the voices of people living with disabilities, identify system-level changes needed to improve policy and practices, or test new models of service delivery. United Way is particularly interested in increasing its investments in programs that close opportunity gaps for communities that face a greater marginalization because of systemic barriers to equal access, opportunities, participation, and resources due to disadvantage and discrimination.