Alvaro Gutierrez: hello and welcome to project access for all. Today we have a very interesting guest. Her name is Christena Gunther. She is the founder and also the co-chair of the Chicago cultural accessibility consortium. Christena it’s a pleasure to have you on the show.

Christena Gunther: thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Alvaro Gutierrez: the first question I need to ask you Christena is what can you tell us about this wonderful organization of yours.

Christena Gunther: well, Chicago Cultural Accessibility Consortium or CCAC is much easier name to call it was started two years ago when I moved from New York to Chicago and I have a background working in cultural accessibility and so when I moved to Chicago I was trying to get connected with that community here and was frankly a little surprised to find out that while there were some great cultural organizations that were working on these issues there really wasn’t an organization or a way for these different organizations to really have a conversation and to really move things forward. When I was in new York I was a part of museum access consortium MAC which was one way that the museum community in New York tried to really start dialogue and education around accessibility issues and so when I moved to Chicago I thought that starting a group similar to MAC except opening it up to theaters and a very broad definition of cultural organizations would be a great way to address some of the issues I saw and also, you know, there were some there are some great organizations is Chicago working on these issues but there’s a lot more work to be done and so really allowing a way to educate and inform cultural administrators about their responsibilities about the ADA about how to follow the law but also about some of the innovative programs and services that are being done around the world that we could do here in Chicago. So that’s kind of where the idea came from and so I worked closely with Lynn Walsh who was at the time at the Chicago children’s museum and Evan Hatfield from Stephen Wolf Theater Company and the three of us put together a steering committee and started to do programing that would be professional development opportunities for cultural administrators around issues of accessibility in museums theatres etc.

Alvaro Gutierrez: How important of work that is Christena

Christena Gunther: Yea, it is very important because Chicago has such a rich arts and culture scene you know there’s so many theaters so many great museums that are known around the world and to be able to really have a good conversation about how we can make the arts even more accessible to people with all types of disabilities (dog barks) is very important

Alvaro Gutierrez: We all love dogs so

Christena Gunther: Yea good (laughter)

Alvaro Gutierrez: Christena, now let’s talk about the ADA for you personally, what do you think is the most important part of this important legislation?

Christena Gunther: that’s a really a really good question and could go a lot of different ways. The fact that it exists to begin with is pretty amazing especially if you look at other countries around the world and see kind of the state of disability rights in some of those places it can be -you know kind of take your breath away. But so I think first of all that the fact that it got passed by a republican president pretty amazing but I would say probably one of my favorite areas of the ADA is the idea of effective communication and I think that whole concept really comes into play a lot of different cultural organizations because so much of what we’re doing is trying to communicate to the public so finding ways to be affective to make that happen to people with varies types of disabilities is something that really resonates with me and it’s a good challenge I think that’s in ADA. It doesn’t give a lot of specific guidance about that means, it does give some but it also really opens it up for interpretation and for organizations to find creative solutions

Alvaro Gutierrez: Christena, I always ask this question of what we could we prove all along the ADA, people always tells me the same, Employment. But my question to you Christena is what do you think is needed to improve the not so great numbers for people with disabilities in employment.