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:
- Developing detailed new knowledge about disparities in community living and participation.
- Identifying or developing available systems-change initiatives or other promising practices for reducing community-living and participation disparities.
- Serving 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 have sought to live independently in the community and/or who currently or previously have done so. We also welcome blog posts sharing the perspectives of advocates who support community living access for underserved populations.
To this end, as we launch the CLEC community blog, we will invite CLEC advisory board members along with CLEC partners and community members to submit blog posts for consideration.
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 within 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.
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.
Other considerations:
We accept posts in English. All posts will be translated 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 by AI or other similar tool.
Your submission should be related to your personal experiences as a disabled person of color dealing with issues related to community living. It should be something you feel comfortable being shared publicly; however, you may choose to remain anonymous on the published website or to use a different name than your own.
What Happens After I Submit?
After a submission is received, it will be sent to two editors who will oversee the process going forward. One editor will be a member of the advisory board. The other editor will be a community member and/or one of CLEC’s peer researchers.
The editors will decide whether to accept the submission 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 will receive $100.
In addition, authors may wish to work with our CLEC staff to develop their submission further. Please let us know if this is something you’d like.
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 in order to provide compensation for a submission.