In this video, activist and athlete Mia Ives-Rublee reflects on what drove her to found the Women’s March Disability Caucus. From the start when she first heard about the Women’s March, Mia was thinking about whether or not it would be accessible to individuals with disabilities. Mia, who has osteogenesis imperfecta, a brittle bone disorder, reached out to her friends to ensure the march and the values that guided the movement would include the voices of people with disabilities.

This was not always easy. As Mia recalls, “the national team released their [‘Why We March’] vision but… it did not include disabled people, and disabled women particularly.

 I started contacting people I knew and was like ‘Hey, you left us out.'”

Thankfully, the national team was receptive to the criticism and apologized. Working with Mia and members of the Disability Caucus, they gave her and her peers a chance to provide feedback on the Why We March principles and incorporated their feedback and rereleased the principals so that the March’s platform would include a focus on the rights and needs of people with disabilities.

“The rest is kind of history, you know. We got to work with over 40,000 people and [provided] services for those people at the Women’s March.”

Mia encourages everybody “particularly disabled people, disabled women, disabled people of color” to go out and vote, whether that is in person on November third of by voting early. To hear more from Mia, you can follow her on Twitter at @SeeMiaRoll. And like Mia suggested, take the opportunity to vote early! You can find all the information you need on early voting from our friends and colleagues over Vote Early Day.