The DIVERSE Collective is funded by the Lucille Packard Foundation for Children's Health.
Project Summary
Children with disabilities experience discrimination in all aspects of their lives. They face barriers to full inclusion and access to the supports and services they need to live their lives and thrive in their communities. Lack of access to needed supports and services contributes to poor health.
Children with disabilities often have other oppressed identities such as being of a minoritized race or ethnicity, or living in poverty. Children with disabilities and other marginalized intersecting identities are at particularly high risk of poor health outcomes.
Unfortunately, while we know a lot about the disparities that multiply marginalized children with disabilities experience, we know very little about how to achieve health equity for this group of children. For this reason, the DIVERSE Collective has launched a comprehensive effort to identify and describe possible solutions for the unique problems faced by this diverse group of children who deserve every opportunity to thrive. We are seeking what works to improve outcomes for multiply marginalized children with disabilities.
Project Initiatives
- A series of solution-based focus groups in both English and Spanish with caregivers of multiply marginalized children with disabilities and with young adults with disabilities to hear what works for them in their communities.
- Interviews with key informants who are experts in how to reduce health disparities for this population, with an emphasis on programs, services and policies in health care, education, foster care, health law, criminal justice reform and beyond.
- A narrative review of the peer reviewed literature to evaluate existing knowledge and identify where knowledge is insufficient, coupled with an appraisal of the non-peer reviewed literature (often referred to as the gray literature).
- A deep dive into programs, services and policies that work to provide exemplars for others implementing or improving programs to reduce disparities.
- Tracking how disability in childhood has changed in the last decade for children with minoritized identities using the National Health Interview Survey.
- Coalescing the findings into a report for the public, policy makers and leaders with the goal of identifying strategies to reduce disparities of multiply marginalized children with disabilities.