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The Disability Resource Center at UNR is putting on its 15th annual Diversability Awareness Month, which runs from mid-October to early November. The month serves to promote the diverse abilities of students with disabilities, helping remove the stigma associated with disability as well as providing the public with a way to understand that those with disabilities are not necessarily defined not strictly limited by their diagnoses. 

October’s events included a Halloween Dance in Sparks and a presentation and live musical performance by the Not-Ables, a musical therapy service in Reno, at the McKinley Arts and Culture Center, as well as the Reno Rumble Wheelchair Rugby Event, an event celebrating persons with disabilities overcoming their limitations by engaging in competitive sports.

November’s events began with the Living Neurodiverse panel at Nightingale Concert Hall at UNR (Nov 1), which I myself was a panelist on. This panel welcomed members of both the University campus community and the larger community of Reno and Sparks to attend and learn from both students and experts the ways that the University can engage with and better understand what it means to be neurodiverse (i.e., those with learning disabilities, developmental disabilities, autism, etc.), to remove the stigma of neurodiversity and provide alternatives for classrooms to accommodate students who learn differently. 

The month’s calendar concludes with the Transition and Technology Fair (Nov 6) at the Joe Crowley Student Union at UNR, which focuses on the use of assistive technologies, service animals, and other community resources to help those with disabilities better adaptable to life both in and out of the university; hands-on tech demos will be available at exhibit booths, and an interpreter will be available. 

The Diversability Awareness Month serves to educate the community about not only the struggles associated with persons with disabilities, but also to destigmatize such struggles and shift the larger social paradigms regarding them: disabilities do not define or even necessarily restrict those affected by them, instead we as a community should recognize that persons with disabilities have their own diverse set of strengths which should be embraced, explored, and understood.