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February 04, 2025

Lawyer Spotlight: Ella Callow

Ella Callow on Her Work at UC Berkeley.

Ella Callow on Her Work at UC Berkeley.

Why did you decide to go to law school?

I was always very interested in politics and social justice. My mother was very political and raised me to be aware of people’s movements in civil society to expand civil rights to all. This motivated me to graduate from high school early, work with anti-war and Native rights organizations as a teenager, and ultimately choose law as a career. 

You currently serve as the Assistant Vice Chancellor, Chief Accessibility Officer & ADA/Section 504 Compliance Officer at UC Berkeley. Why did you decide to take this position?

I had spent a decade and a half advocating, researching and writing to further the rights of disabled people nationally and internationally. I am a ‘Double Bear’ (went to Berkeley undergraduate and law school) and felt it was a great opportunity to give back to the institution that trained me to do good work in the world. Also, I was first diagnosed with a psychiatric disability while a student at Berkeley, so there was some sort of symmetry there.

How do you define accessibility and inclusion?

Accessibility is, to me, about ensuring that disabled people have the same opportunity as non-disabled people to enjoy the physical and digital environments, as well as all programmatic offerings—education, employment, training, housing, recreation, transportation, etc. Inclusion is about how they feel when they do; do they feel they are treated as an afterthought? As a burden to be managed? If so, that isn’t inclusion. They should feel thought about, seen, and wanted. Inclusion is when you are appreciated as a part of the community.

Please describe your role and its significance to students with disabilities and campus culture. 

At a high level, my role is essentially to make sure that the campus complies with federal and state disability law, and with UC Office of the President and UC Berkeley policies designed to incorporate those disability laws into our institutional culture and practice. On a more intimate level, my role is to pull the disability community—faculty, staff and students—together, along with disability service program managers, and allies, and facilitate their sharing their wants, needs, challenges and solutions with campus leadership. As Ed Roberts said so eloquently, “The minute other people start speaking for you, you lose.” We have to ‘speak’ to campus leadership in order to chart our own destiny.

In serving in this role, what are the biggest challenges that you face?  How are you addressing these challenges? 

The most significant challenges we face are financial and cultural. Financially, we are a public university and neoliberal austerity state funding year after year has meant that the monies devoted to barrier removal in the physical environment, for instance, have stayed flat while our infrastructure aged, deferred maintenance increased, and the number of disabled students, staff and faculty increased. The campus has continued to commit new monies as possible, but nowhere near the level they or we would like. Culturally, the amendment of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 2008, and the regulations that followed in 2011, broadened protections for disabled people in higher education and created a significant increase in the number of disabled students who chose to apply to and attend university. The number of disabled students registered with our Disabled Students’ Program increased three times over from 2014 to 2024, creating a greater focus on these students, their needs, perspectives and positions. We now have, for instance, the first significant cohorts of disabled graduate students. They are very active both on individual campuses and collectively via social media. That is a concrete change for the academy, broadly, not just Berkeley.

What changes are you most proud of and why?

There have been SO many changes and I’m happy about them all! If I had to pick three, I’d say advances concerning the physical environment, community building, and emergency safety.

Physical Environment: We conducted an ADA Transition Plan (TP) in 2020, which  documented all the deficiencies in the physical environment. Berkeley was an early adopter of the ADA, so we had a TP but it was from the 1990s and no longer valid. The new one helped us to design an ADA Master Plan, a set of three dozen construction projects that elegantly resolve all deficiencies in our external paths of travel—the biggest issue for us in the physical environment. The Plan has won multiple awards.

Community Building: When I arrived, the community was less cohesive and had fewer spaces/structures to help unify our voices and allow us to ‘speak’ to leadership. In the time I’ve been here we developed the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Disability Access & Planning (CACDAP), with representation from disability service programs, disabled students, staff, faculty and allies. We have disabled community Town Halls, State-of-the-States, and opened the first Disability Community Cultural Center on a UC campus.

Emergency Safety: My office together with the disability community on campus created an emergency evacuation and safety planning self-identification survey, held individualized evacuation consultations, and prioritized funding accessible evacuation signage, evacuation chair purchasing, and disabled participation in the Emergency Operations Center structure. This is incredibly important, as each disaster shows us, safety and evacuation planning programs must consider disabled people from the get-go or there will be a disparate impact on our community.

UC Berkeley was at the forefront of the independent living movement in the 1960s and 1970s. How have things changed since then, and what work still needs to be done?

I think it is fair to say that our disabled elders did incredible work here in that era and, as a result, not only Berkeley but the nation is far more accessible. There is a very different set of expectations that the ADA generation (those born after passage of the ADA and educated under the IDEA) now brings to the national conversation and everyday life. The challenges we face now are, in many ways, less obvious and more complex: how to make the digital environment accessible and inclusive; how to make spaces like gardens and open spaces accessible, not just normative paths of travel; how to ensure that we are recognizing intersectionality in the disability community and working for disability justice (i.e., ensuring disabled people with historically oppressed intersecting identities receive the benefits of the Disability Rights structure in the way that is best for them). I think what remains the same is that Berkeley still draws inspired, passionate disabled people who become, generation after generation, brilliant public disabled intellectuals. From Jacobus tenBroek to Ed Roberts, from Judith Heumann to Victor Pineda. It is part of who we are and what we do as a community here.

Based on your knowledge, are college campuses across the country prioritizing accessibility and inclusivity for students with disabilities? 

As I noted earlier the amendment of the ADA has created larger cohorts of disabled students across our college campuses and academia is reacting to that. I see many campuses working to do what campuses are designed to do—support their students. What is challenging is often funding and that cultural shift to recognizing and meeting that responsibility on a larger scale.

You have a long history of disability rights advocacy.  For example, you served as the Legal Program Director for the National Center for Parents with Disabilities and their Families for almost 13 years. Can you highlight some of the work you believe made a significant impact on parents with disabilities and their families?  

A crucial project we undertook was analyzing what portion of the child welfare parent population was comprised of disabled parents. This was a research model that had been more limitedly applied in the US post-passage of the ADA and also in England. Until you can answer that question, you cannot have a national policy dialogue about how to ensure parents and their children’s civil rights are protected in the system. I also took a contract to write what was eventually titled “Rocking the Cradle: Ensuring the Rights of Parents with Disabilities and their Children” for the National Council on Disability (NCD), which advises Congress and the Executive on issues of importance to the disability community. The report also included writing from my mentor Dr. Paul Preston, and a few others, and was edited by Robin Powell of NCD. It led the US Department of Justice (DOJ), following a bad case involving a mother with intellectual disabilities, to issue guidance to the child welfare systems and courts that the ADA and other federal disability rights laws did, in fact, apply in their systems (an issue that had been contested) and requiring that disability-based accommodations and modifications be provided. Finally, I would say that my research on the pseudo-scientific use of IQ to predict parenting capacity in child welfare cases has been frequently used to advocate for that very pathologized population of parents.

Have you seen progress in disabled parents’ rights?

Yes. Following publication of the new guidance, I was brought in by the DOJ as a litigation consultant to help them craft a consent decree for the state of Massachusetts, which had violated the rights of a disabled mother and her child. That decree became the first of its kind—very comprehensive, and a promising model. Many states have passed legislation to protect this population of families, and even at the federal level we have seen continual improvements, including in the final rule updating Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which was published in May 2024.

What challenges remain?

US Health and Human Services should develop mandatory data collection on parental disability in child welfare systems, disability training for all child welfare workers and officers of the court who work in dependency—similar to that required under the Violence Against Women Act—and tie funding to data collection and training. Also, there must be concerted efforts to include curriculum on serving disabled consumers in schools of social welfare, occupational therapy, law, etc., whose graduates will impact child welfare involved families with disabilities. Finally, there must be a concerted effort to ensure that experts in providing accommodated parenting assessments, adaptive childcare equipment assessments, and other specialized services are available in all states. 

How have your multiple identities as a person with a disability and a member of the American Indian/Alaskan Native community informed your understanding of disability? 

The exclusion and segregation of Native people from American society, the government’s intentional destruction of Native families through forced adoptions and boarding school enrollment of Native children—the general cruelty of the policies Native people were subjected to—is echoed in many ways in the government’s policies toward disabled people for most of the 20th century. So, when I began doing disability legal work, I didn’t know the words but could hum the tune, so to speak, because of my background with the Native community. Also, I think my conceptualization of disability and what it did and didn’t mean, was shaped by the Native community— anyone interested in that I encourage to read Lavonna Lovern’s article ‘Indigenous Concepts of Difference: an alternative to Western disability labeling’ . Essentially, I did not have the same set of negative assumptions about disabled people to work through.

Why is intersectionality so important to disability justice?

Disability Justice for me means being sure that the benefits of the Disability Rights structure flow to all disabled people, in the way they need them, not just in predetermined ways and to people not historically negatively racialized. When we say we are working on behalf of ‘disabled people’ but don’t recognize that that is a vast and diverse population, we will not ultimately be successful in doing that work. For instance, Native people are the most often disabled of any group in the United States. Yet, there is very little Native representation in national disability leadership (policy, law, government) and very little focus on what Native communities —rural or urban—need in relation to supporting their disabled community members.