Lurie Institute Releases New Comprehensive Data Dashboard on Parents with Disabilities and Community Living Equity
On December 3, 2024, in celebration of International Day of People with Disabilities Day, the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy released its new interactive dashboard to learn more about people with disabilities.
Historically, data about people with disabilities and their experiences has been difficult to access, navigate, and understand. Our interactive data dashboards offer a solution for advocates, policymakers, and researchers, portraying information about parents with disabilities and community living services in visually engaging and easy-to-use ways. We hope these dashboards can serve as an effective tool for disability advocates to further the rights, access, and inclusion of the disability community.
There are 2 main dashboards to explore: the Parents with Disabilities Dashboard and the Community Living Equity Dashboard.
View the dashboards on our website: DisabilityDataDashboard.com
National Research Center for Parents with Disabilities Dashboard
About 7% of parents have a disability in the U.S. That is roughly 4.5 million people!. However, the rights of disabled parents are continuously challenged. Many professionals who work with disabled people do not recognize that people with disabilities are parents or can become parents. Additionally, information about disabled parents can unfortunately be hard to find and understand, leading to further confusion and lack of awareness. These dashboards offer a solution to this problem.
The three dashboards show data about disabled parents in engaging and easy-to-use ways. People with disabilities, program providers, child welfare professionals, researchers, policymakers, advocates, and practitioners can use these data sets to learn about parents with disabilities and expand their outreach and advocacy efforts in support of them.
The Parents with Disabilities Dashboard's data is broken down into three main sections that examine who disabled parents are and what their parental rights look like depending on where they live.
The sections cover:
- the demographics of disabled parents,
- US states that have legislation supporting disabled parents, and
- US states that have laws that terminate parental rights based on disability.
The Parents with Disabilities Dashboard is available in English and Spanish.
Community Living Equity Dashboard
People with disabilities deserve to live independently and in the community. Data is an important tool to advocate for disabled people’s autonomy and access to supportive services. However, data about Home and Community-Based Services and Long-Term Services and Supports is not collected in the same way in each state, leaving large gaps in understanding who needs services and who is actually receiving them.
These dashboards are the most comprehensive and user-friendly data sets about LTSS, HCBS, and program-related disparities available. Advocates, policymakers, researchers, and the broader disability community can utilize the dashboards to learn who uses LTSS and HCBS and what systemic biases impact who can access these services. Advocates can use the data to propose timely policy changes that address the unmet needs and existing inequities in service provision.
The Community Living Dashboard, created by the Community Living Equity Center, has three main sections that provides national- and state-level data on:
- who needs Long-Term Services and Supports (LTSS),
- who receives Medicaid LTSS, and
- disparities that exist in accessing Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS) (coming soon!).
We eagerly anticipate the disability community’s feedback about their experience navigating and utilizing the dashboard as a tool in their advocacy efforts.