Submit a Blog Post About Your Experiences
The Community Living Equity Center blog examines barriers in access to community living services and support for underserved people with disabilities. The CLEC blog seeks to align its calls for blog post submissions with its other activities such as major research projects and publications as well as webinars and other events. With this in mind, suggested blog-post topics will reflect and support current CLEC activities in order to amplify varying needs and interests among community members from diverse backgrounds, particularly those from marginalized communities. What makes this blog transformative is the space it offers for community members to discuss their perspectives on barriers and supports as related to community living for persons of color with disabilities.
Call for Submissions on Our Current Featured Theme
Are you a person of color with a disability? Have you experienced barriers to transitioning from a nursing home or other institution to community living?
Share Your Experience in a Blog Post or Video. Share your story in our blog about the experiences and needs of disabled people who are seeking or have experiences with transitions from institutional living to community living.
Blog posts are accepted throughout the year, but we encourage you to submit posts that fit our current community-living topic.
How Current Topics Are Selected
The CLEC will announce its call for submissions twice per year. The call will include a topic for blog posts.
Our selected topics will reflect the following CLEC aims:
- To gain detailed new information about disparities in community living and participation.
- To pursue initiatives or other promising practices that reduce community-living and participation disparities.
- To serve as a national resource for disability and rehabilitation research on community living and participation that is inclusive of people with disabilities from traditionally underserved communities.
Who Should Submit a Blog Post?
The CLEC blog centers the diverse perspectives and experiences of people of color with disabilities who live or have lived independently in the community—or who have sought to do so, whether or not their efforts were successful. We also welcome blog posts sharing the perspectives of advocates who support community living access for underserved populations.
As we launch the CLEC community blog, we will invite CLEC advisory board members along with CLEC partners to submit blog posts for consideration. Community members with experience with community living are invited to submit blog posts as well.
What Should I Submit?
Traditional essay-style blog posts are great. Please aim for around 500 words for these.
We also encourage creative submissions! These might include:
- A poem
- A short (1-minute) video
- A graphic
Unsure if your idea for a blog submission will fit with our community blog?
Just email us at CLequity@brandeis.edu to discuss! We emphasize flexibility of design, focusing on accessibility and wide appeal of submissions over strict technical standards.
Additional considerations:
Your submission should be related to your personal experiences as a disabled person of color dealing with issues related to community living. The experiences you share should be those you feel comfortable being publicly available; however, you may choose to remain anonymous on the published version of your post or to use a different name than your own. (Please see below for additional information on this.)
Due to our current capacity, we can only accept posts submitted in English. However, we will translate all posts accepted for publication into Spanish.
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis. Email your submission to CLequity@brandeis.edu with the subject "Blog Submission."
Submissions should be the submitter's original work and not be generated with the aid of AI or other similar tool or application.
Note: Because our program receives federal funding, we’re not allowed to talk about politics. Avoid writing posts that directly support or oppose political candidates, ballot questions or propositions, or government officials. Other than that, though, we’re fairly open.
What Happens After I Submit?
After a submission is received, it will be reviewed by editors, one of whom will be a member of the advisory board and another who will be a community member and/or one of CLEC’s peer researchers.
The editors will decide on accepting submissions for publication. In order to publish, they may ask for revisions or lightly edit the submission to fit within our guidelines. You may withdraw your submission at any time prior to publication.
A submission selected for publication on our website will receive $100.
In addition, authors/creators may wish to work with our CLEC staff to develop their submission further. Please let us know if this is something you’d like and we will be happy to help.
Would you like to be anonymous for purposes of publication?
We are happy to publish your submission anonymously or to allow the use of display names. However, we will require a legal name for our records in order to provide compensation for a published submission.