Robyn Powell
Robyn M. Powell is Principal of Robyn Powell Consulting, LLC, a disability law and policy
consulting firm. As a disabled woman, Ms. Powell has dedicated her career to advancing
the rights of people with disabilities. Most recently, Ms. Powell served as an Attorney
Advisor at the National Council on Disability (NCD), an independent federal agency that
advises the President and Congress on matters concerning people with disabilities.
Previously, she served as the Disability Rights Program Manager at the Equal Rights
Center, Assistant Director for Policy and Advocacy at the Disability Policy Consortium,
and Staff Attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services. While in law school, Ms. Powell
interned for both the NCD and the Disability Law Center, the Massachusetts Protection
& Advocacy agency.
As a disability rights activist and scholar, Ms. Powell is a member of several
organizations, including the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental
Disabilities, International Association for the Scientific Study of Intellectual and
Developmental Disabilities, American Public Health Association, National Association of
Lawyers with Disabilities, and the Boston Bar Association. In August 2015, Ms. Powell
was appointed to the American Bar Association’s Commission on Disability Rights. Ms.
Powell is also a Board Member of the Disability Policy Consortium.
Ms. Powell is one of the country’s foremost authorities on the rights of parents with
disabilities. Ms. Powell is principal author of NCD’s Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the
Rights of Parents with Disabilities and their Children. Ms. Powell has written and
presented extensively on the needs and experiences of parents with disabilities and has
been interviewed by various news outlets, including NPR, BBC, ABC News, the Daily
Beast, New York Magazine, and the Associated Press.
Ms. Powell is currently pursuing her PhD at the Heller School for Social Policy and
Management at Brandeis University and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Social
Work from Bridgewater State University and a Juris Doctor from Suffolk University Law
School.
Alice Wong
Alice Wong is a Staff Research Associate and part of the research team for the
Community Living Policy Center (CLPC), a Rehabilitation Research and Training Center
funded by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation
Research and the Administration for Community Living.
The daughter of Chinese immigrants, Alice was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana
and moved to San Francisco to attend graduate school at the Department of Social and
Behavioral Sciences, University of California, San Francisco where she remains today as a
researcher with the CLPC. Part of her work for the CLPC includes the authoring of online
curricula for personal assistance workers and family caregivers for Elsevier’s College of
Personal Assistance and Caregiving and other qualitative research projects about people
with disabilities and Long Term Services and Supports.
Alice cares deeply about community living, disability justice, intersectionality, and the
belief that disability must be part of any discussion about diversity (and vice versa).
In 2014, Alice created the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), a community partnership
with StoryCorps and an online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and
sharing disability stories and culture.
As an avid user of social media, Alice advocates for disability issues by moderating a
Facebook group for the DVP and hosting Twitter chats on topics such as emergency
preparedness and media representation of disabled people. This year, she is a copartner in #CripTheVote, a non-partisan online campaign encouraging civic engagement
of people with disabilities during the 2016 Presidential election.
Involved in the local and national disability community, Alice serves as a Board Member
for the Special Hope Foundation and the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund.
She is an Advisory Board member of Asian Pacific Islanders with Disabilities of California
and a former Presidential appointee to the National Council on Disability.
With many interests and not enough time, Alice is an advisor on two radio shows: In
Plain Sight and Intersections Radio. She is in the midst of producing her first radio story
featuring people with disabilities who use personal assistance as a recipient of a
Community Storytelling Radio Fellowship from Making Contact radio based in Oakland,
California. She’s also a volunteer for 18millionrising.org and a contributor to The Nerds
of Color.
For fun, she likes to nerd out over science fiction and fantasy shows, coffee, bakeries,
cyborgs, and cats. She is the daughter of Henry and Bobby Wong and sister to Emily and
Grace.