Dear Friends,
This past year I’ve been turning to leaders, teachers and mentors for advice as we found destabilizing situations, crises and uncertainty commonplace. One quote that I kept coming back to is from Martin Luther King Jr. which says, “All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
The current applications of this quote could be applied in so many ways, from the pandemic we’ve been experiencing to the Black Lives Matters movement, but I also see how it relates to the work we do at ICS. When the pandemic first broke, we were all stunned to see how our lives changed in innumerable ways. Yet, what didn’t change was the work ICS does. Since the onset of the pandemic, our close to 80 staff continued to work side by side (of course wearing extensive PPE or moving to online meetings!) with our 326 clients. The work we do didn’t slow, it actually increased as we tried our best to keep up with an onslaught of changing information to keep our staff and clients safe.
Although we kept working on goals of independent living and employment for the people we serve, our work became even more essential around how to keep ourselves and our community safe and healthy. The inescapable network of mutuality becomes abundantly clear in times of crises. This call for considering mutuality has always been at the heart of what ICS has worked towards: to spotlight not just the ways our community can support people with disabilities, but to also elevate the ways in which people with disabilities can give back to our community. In this past year, there are so many examples of how people with disabilities have stepped up to give back to our community: from working at grocery stores, to cleaning spaces to keep us safe, to being champions of adhering to social distancing and safety precautions in Marin, we owe many thanks to our neighbors with disabilities for their work in keeping us all safe and demonstrating that when we work together, our shared destinies are strengthened.
Thank you for working alongside ICS this past year. On behalf of our committed board, dedicated staff and diverse clients, we are grateful for all you have done to support ICS. In community-Abby