Just a month ago, the NIDILRR community lost a pioneer in disability and rehabilitation research, Betty Jo Berland. For more than 30 years Ms. Berland was one of the long poles holding up what would become the NIDILRR tent. She was an early influencer of the agency’s initial direction and aimed its research toward assisting people with disabilities in their lifelong conquest to live the best life of their choosing. Ms. Berland was actively involved on many levels, from providing testimony before Congressional committees and advocating for the rehabilitation engineering centers and the passage of the Tech Act, to acting as the special assistant to the director of NIDRR, as it was known previously.
Ms. Berland grew with the disability movement. Her earliest contributions included testimony to the US Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, Subcommittee on the Handicapped, where she spoke on issues related to the conservation and development of human resources for persons with disabilities. In the early 1970s, she was part of a non-government organization that had a contract with Rehabilitation Services Administration (RSA) to conduct a congressionally mandated evaluation of sheltered workshops. The themes of her testimony would be familiar to the nation’s disability community today: She stressed solutions for the general rehabilitation, socialization, and amelioration of problems of daily living; preparation for and placement in competitive employment; and the provision of long-term remunerative employment.
“The present system often acts as a deterrent because of the individual’s fear and insecurity concerning the competitive employment situation and their own abilities to maintain their new earnings level. They need a more gradual phasing out of SSI coverage and then eligibility for medical assistance be retained automatically until they secure income above medical assistance levels,” said Ms. Berland. She recommended continued and big risk attacks on systemic barriers, including equal employment opportunity legislation and affirmative action provisions.
Ms. Berland’s career spanned an array of interest. Throughout the 1980s she worked on a wide variety of research programs. She pushed for post-polio syndrome studies to establish funding for NIDRR research and development programs regarding poliomyelitis and its impact on aging. She co-authored research and policy papers for legislation including the Technology-Related Assistance for Individuals with Disabilities Act and the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act, and helped write other papers with researchers from the Beach Center on Families and Disability, one of the earliest homes to Rehabilitation Research and Training Centers on community living.
Early in the 1990s, Ms. Berland was appointed as the NIDRR Planning and Evaluation Officer, where she led the efforts and oversight for research and demonstration projects, rehabilitation research and training centers, and rehabilitation research engineering centers. Once again, she championed the need for increased NIDRR funding before Congress and examining proposed legislation to authorize funds for Programs of the Developmental Disabilities Assistance and Bill of Rights Act.
During those hearings, Ms. Berland highlighted NIDRR’s continued focus on improving opportunities for full community participation for all people with disabilities, encouraging state and federal programs to look for “…people who continue to fall through the cracks, people who are not necessarily eligible for services under some of the existing statutes…”
“[They] have not yet solved the problem of reaching the hard-to-reach, the so-called underserved populations who may be minorities, the people who are not English-speaking, the elderly, and in many cases residents of rural areas.“
Not only did Ms. Berland battle for NIDILRR on Capitol Hill but she was also a regular speaker at various professional- and consumer-led conferences and meetings. Shortly before Ms. Berland retired in the early 2000’s, she gave a Report to the Nation, “Ending Crimes of Violence Against Children and Adults with Disabilities.” In it, she advocated for the importance of safe, stable homes in the community; removing perpetrators of violence versus institutionalizing children “for their safety”; accessible programs and services to combat domestic violence; and cross-training first responders, service providers, and advocates in crisis care.
Ms. Berland was truly a champion for the philosophy of full participation of people with disabilities in the communities of their choosing. Through her leadership in government and her partnership with the research and development community, she moved the cause forward by years, if not decades. She will be deeply missed but her work will continue.