Acknowledgements
Access Living would first like to thank Candace Coleman, our Community Strategy Specialist; Michelle García, our Manager of Organizing and Community Development; and Daisy Feidt, our Executive Vice President, for their roles in developing and launching the focus group effort that led to this paper.
We could not have done this work without our peer facilitators, who all have lived experience as gun violence survivors with disabilities: Simone Wilson, Eric Vazquez, Cedrick Frison, Vanessa Quintanilla, Willie Rolling, Jr. and Michael Walthall. We thank Carla Johnson for her service as our Gun Violence Coordinator.
We thank Cathleen O’Brien and Kathy Torimoto for supporting this project as interns with the Adler School of Professional Psychology.
We also thank Lena Parsons, as well as Access Living staffers Amber Smock, Latricia Seye, Valerie Hines, Katie Blank, Atta Zahedi, Emma Olson, and Ashley Eisenmenger, for their roles in completing this paper.
We also thank SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana, the Illinois Department of Human Services Office of Firearm Violence Prevention, the City of Chicago, Metropolitan Family Services, C4, the Chicago Park District Adaptive Sports & Recreation Programs, Chicago CRED, Acclivus, the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, Broken Winggz, LiveEquipd, Communities United, Advocate Christ Medical Center, Enlace Chicago, Shirley Ryan AbilityLab, BUILD Chicago, the Chicago Torture Justice Center, Giffords, Aurora Health, and Schwab Rehabilitation Hospital.
Most of our listening sessions were virtual. However, we would like to thank Dan Ferrara at the Douglass Park Fieldhouse of the Chicago Park District for helping us host an in-person session.
This project was generously funded and supported by the Ford Foundation. Their support allowed Access Living to allocate staff time, develop research led by directly affected survivors, contract with a coordinator, and pay the peer facilitators. Without this support, particularly for the survivor participants’ compensation, we would not have been able to collect such honest and raw first-person qualitative data.