Disability Pride Month 2025

Tuesday, July 1 | Flag Raising at Flag Plaza: 3:30 PM - 4:00 PM | Reception at Kaiser Borsari Hall 122: 4:00 PM - 5:00 PM | WIN Event Listing

We are kicking off the celebration of July as Disability Pride Month by raising the disability pride flag on the University flagpole! Join us on Tuesday, July 1 at 3:30 PM at Flag Plaza. After raising the flag, we will move to Kaiser Borsari Hall Meeting Room 122 at 4:00 PM to socialize and share some food. All are welcome to attend!

Accessibility:

WWU Flag Plaza is on South Campus Drive located between Wade King Student Recreation Center and the Academic Institutional West building. Standard-height armless chairs with a backrest will be provided as a seating option at Flag Plaza. 

KB 122 is in Kaiser Borsari Hall. Kaiser Borsari Hall is on East College Way located between the Communications Facility building and Sehome Arboretum. It is about 0.2 miles from Flag Plaza to Kaiser Borsari Hall. Kaiser Borsari Hall is an ADA accessible building. The north and south entrances have automatic door openers. Standard-height armless chairs with a backrest will be the primary seating option provided at KB 122 in addition to a few bar-height armless chairs with backrests. Kaiser Borsari Hall has accessible restrooms. All restrooms in this building are all-gender restrooms. 

Seating information is accurate to the best of our ability but subject to change. 

Tuesday, July 8 | 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM | Microsoft Teams | WIN Event Listing

Join us for the Neurodiversity Inclusion Collaborative July Meeting during Disability Pride Month!

The Neurodiversity Inclusion Collaborative is made up of students, staff, and faculty from across the University who advocate in identifying the needs for change on-campus and strive to bring awareness, acceptance, and community building for an inclusive and accessible campus for neurodivergent people.

Get involved! Email neurodiversity.inclusion@wwu2.onmicrosoft.com for more information and to get connected. We meet monthly on the first Tuesday from 3:00 PM - 4:00 PM on Microsoft Teams. For July, we will be meeting on the second Tuesday of the month due to the Disability Pride Flag Raising and Reception on the first Tuesday of the month. 

Accessibility:

AA/EO. Accessibility Statement: This event is intended for all participants including those with apparent or non-apparent disabilities. For disability accommodation(s) (such as ASL interpretation or TypeWell transcription), please contact neurodiversity.inclusion@wwu2.onmicrosoft.com. Advanced notice is appreciated and sometimes necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

Microsoft Teams meeting information:

Meeting ID: 250 794 075 724

Passcode: se7ebB

Dial in by phone

+1 206-800-4437,,93829311# United States, Seattle

Find a local number

Phone conference ID: 938 293 11#

Friday, July 25 | 3:30 PM - 5:00 PM | Multicultural Center Multi-Use Room (Viking Union 735) | WIN Event Listing

Join us for the Disability Pride Month reception for the Disability Employee Resource Group! The Disability Employee Resource Group is a new ERG for disabled, chronically ill, neurodivergent, Blind and low vision, Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing employees and allies. 

Accessibility:

AA/EO. This event is intended for all participants including those with apparent or non-apparent disabilities. For disability accommodation(s), please contact disabilityerg@wwu2.onmicrosoft.com. Advanced notice is appreciated and sometimes necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.

VU 735 is in the Viking Union. Viking Union is an ADA accessible building. Button activated entrances are located on the southeast side and northwest side of the building near Garden Street. Elevators provide access to all levels.

VU 735 typically has standard height chairs with fixed arm rests. Seating information is accurate to the best of our ability but subject to change.  

ADA accessible and all-gender bathrooms are located on the 3rd floor (VU 714 are all-gender and ADA accessible and VU 351 and 353 are all-gender) and the 7th floor (VU 714 and 717 are ADA accessible and all-gender and VU 715 and 716 are all-gender).

There is a quiet Meditation Room on the 7th floor of the VU. 

To recognize Disability Pride Month, the Disability Access Center and Disability Outreach Center are putting together a social media campaign to highlight disability pride, positive disability identity development, and the disability community. If you would like to participate and be featured on the Instagram accounts of the Disability Access Center, Disability Outreach Center, and the Centers for Student Access, Community, and Intercultural Engagement, please fill out the Disability Pride Month Social Media Campaign interest form. 

*Disability is used as an umbrella term to encompass physical, sensory, cognitive, neurodivergence, emotional/psychiatric, and undiagnosed disabilities and/or other identities and experiences including chronically ill, neurodivergent, Blind and low vision or partially sighted, Deaf, Deaf+, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing people. This is not meant to erase any identities or experiences but is used as a shorthand for clarity. If you use other identity terms or language, please feel free to indicate that.

Prompts:

• Prompt 1. Do you identify as disabled? If so, how did you come to understand yourself as disabled? If not, how do you identify and how did you come to that identity?
• Prompt 2. How does being disabled intersect with the other identities you hold and experiences you've had? How does being a part of the disability community intersect (or not intersect) with other communities you are a part of?
• Prompt 3. Do you have disability pride or pride in your disabled identity or another identity such as being Deaf, DeafBlind, or Hard of Hearing? If so, how did you develop a positive disability identity or pride in your identity?
• Prompt 4. Did your views of disability or the disability community change in college or at Western Washington University? If so, how and why?
• Prompt 5. What do you want non-disabled people to know about disability, disabled identities and experiences, and the disability community?

Ways To Participate:

• Film a video answering one of the prompts. The Disability Pride Month Planning Committee will create a video with captions and a video description.
• Record audio answering one of the prompts. The Disability Pride Month Planning Committee will either create a video with captions or create a post with the transcript from your audio recording.
• Provide a written quote and your first name as well as any additional information you'd like to share (role at WWU, year, major, minor). The Disability Pride Month Planning Committee will create a post with your quote.
• Provide an anonymous written quote. The Disability Pride Month Planning Committee will create a post with your quote.

All WWU continuing and recently graduated students, faculty, and staff are invited to participate. You can answer one prompt, multiple, or all. Alumni are invited to participate by emailing your responses to the prompts and/or sending audio or video files to disability.outreach@wwu.edu.

Disclaimers:

• Responses to this form are only accessible by the supervisor of the Disability Outreach Center.
• Inclusion of information as part of the Disability Pride Month Social Media Campaign will be posted at the discretion of the Disability Pride Month Planning Committee.
• Please do not use this form as a mechanism to report accessibility concerns. For comments or concerns related to physical or digital barriers and accessibility, please fill out the Western Accessibility Barrier Form.
• Please note that members of the Disability Pride Month Planning Committee are Responsible Employees (mandated reporters). Western employees must promptly report known or suspected sexual harassment, sexual violence, or other discrimination based on sex to the Title IX Coordinator, even if the misconduct occurred off campus. Please find resources including confidential resources such as the Counseling and Wellness Center and Survivor Advocacy Servies on the Support Services page.

Western Libraries is celebrating Disability Pride through highlight a selection of items in their collections that give voice to the many disability communities in a display in the Libraries and online on the Celebrating Disability Pride page.

Disability Pride Month is celebrated every July and is an “opportunity to honor the history, achievements, experiences, and struggles” of the disabled community (The Arc, 2024). This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), passed July 26, 1990, the landmark legislation that broke down barriers to access and inclusion in society (The Arc, 2024). 2025 also marks the 52nd anniversary of the 504 Sit-In and passage of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, the first federal civil rights protection for disabled people (Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, 2024).

The Disability Pride Flag, designed by Ann Magill, a writer with cerebral palsy, is the symbol of the disability pride movement. The original Disability Pride Flag, which featured brightly colored zigzagging stripes over a black background, was created by Ann Magill in 2019. Ann Magill had “attended an event for the 20th anniversary of the ADA and was disappointed that it was confined to the basement and grounds of an independent living center — instead of out in public. The experience motivated her to create a Disability Pride Flag” (Columbia University, 2023). As she explained in an interview on The Accessible Stall podcast, "My first design idea was to make the stripes zigzag, to represent how disabled people have to maneuver around all the barriers we face. We have to go this way and then we have to go that way, and then we have to go this way and then we have to go that way. And that’s how we move through the world." However, it came to Ann Magill's attention that “when viewed on a phone or computer screen, the design was causing symptoms for individuals with visually triggered disabilities including seizure and migraine disorders” (Ballard, 2023). The redesigned version of the flag, created by Ann Magill in 2021 in collaboration with several people with visually triggered disabilities, softens the colors and made the stripes straight instead of zigzagging. The order of the stripes was also changed to accommodate people with red-green colorblindness (Magill, 2022). 

The visually safe Disability Pride Flag features a muted black background with a diagonal band from the top left to bottom right corner, made up of five parallel stripes in red, gold, white, blue, and green. Each element of the flag carries meaning for the disabled community:

• Faded Black Background: Represents "the anger and mourning over the eugenics and the neglect that disabled people have to fight against,"
• Six "Standard" Flag Colors: Represents that the disabled community “is pan-national, spanning borders between states and nations,”
• Red Stripe: Represents physical disabilities,
• Gold Stripe: Represents neurodivergence,
• White Stripe: Represents non-apparent disabilities and undiagnosed disabilities,
• Blue Stripe: Represents emotional and psychiatric disabilities,
• Green Stripe: Represents sensory disabilities, including d/Deafness, blindness, lack of smell, lack of taste, audio processing disorder, and all other sensory disabilities (Magill, 2022).

• Introduction to the Americans with Disabilities Act | ADA.gov
• Northwest ADA Center | ADANW
• Change, Not Charity: The Americans with Disabilities Act | Full Film (YouTube)
• The impact of the Deaf President Now protest - The Deaf President Now (DPN) Protest | Gallaudet University

Student Engagement

• Disability Outreach Center
• ICDS Student Advisory Council
• Disability Studies and Action Collaborative Support and Discussion Groups
• Adaptive Sports Club
• Disabled Theatre Coalition
• Disability and Neurodivergence Club

Student Support Services

• Disability Access Center
• Counseling and Wellness Center
• Student Health Center
• Career Services Center
  • Resources for Disabled Students and Alumni
• Neurodiversity Inclusion Collaborative
• Neurodiversity Initiative

Academics

• Institute for Critical Disability Studies
  • DISA courses
  • Minor in Critical Disability Studies
• BAE in Disability and Advocacy or Minor in Disability and Advocacy
• MA in Rehabilitation Counseling