Our History:
The Coelho Center for Disability Law, Policy, and Innovation launched in the summer of 2018, housed at Loyola Law School in Downtown Los Angeles. The Coelho Center's Founder, the Honorable Anthony "Tony" Coelho, is an alumnus of Loyola Marymount University from the class of 1964, and became a U.S. Congressman and the author and original sponsor of the Americans with Disabilities Act.
The Coelho Center moved locations in April 2024 to LMU's main campus in Westchester where new offices were constructed to accommodate the growing staff.
Our Mission:
The Coelho Center collaborates with the disability community to cultivate leadership and advocate systemic approaches to advance the lives of people with disabilities.
Our Four Areas of Focus:
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Convening & Coalitions
With an emphasis on centering disabled voices, we bring together and join thought leaders, advocates, and policymakers to discuss and craft agendas that seek positive change for the disability community. We also develop opportunities and create space for new members to engage in these discussions.
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Policy & Research
As a Center embedded at an R2 University, we join our colleagues in engaging in cutting edge research. We join our colleagues in across the university using disability studies, disability rights, and disability justice frameworks to ensure that we reject the medical model of disability and engage with the disability community represented in our studies. As scholar pracitioners at the Center, we put our research into practice informing our policy agenda and visa versa.
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Increasing Pathways
No organization in America is creating a pathway of lawyers with disabilities to populate the bar and bench and hold elected office. The Coelho Center works to bring attention and solutions to the barriers that exist for people with disabilities interested in entering the legal field, becoming public policy experts, and holding political office.
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Campus-Wide Efforts
The Coelho Center works on local, state, national, and international levels. Yet, our work is both external and internal to our home at Loyola Marymount University. The Coelho Center works across LMU to help foster a scholarly community dedicated to studying disability studies, fosters students and practitioners interested in working with the disability community, and provides training to enhance campus-wide efforts to improve a positive climate at LMU for people with disabilities.
Our Guiding Principles:
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Nothing (About Us) Without Us
Drawing on a disability rights movement slogan originating in the 1990s, "Nothing about us without us," means that no decisions about the disability community should be made without the participation of members from our community. Stated in shorthand, "nothing without us" acknowledges that all facets of policy decisions affect the disability community. As such, our first guiding principle asks, "Does our work center disabled people in all execution levels?"
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Intersectionality
Intersectionality is a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989. Crenshaw, a black feminist legal scholar, used the principle to describe interlocking oppressions that black women faced in the employment context, noting that a black woman's experiences cannot be understood by interrogating blackness and womanhood separately but rather by understanding how these identities reinforce one another. Since then, "intersectionality" has been widely used to address multiple social justice issues, including how ableism intersects with other oppressions. People with disabilities who experience oppression at multiple axis do not benefit when we only address ableism. As such, our second guiding principle asks, "Does our work address intersectional issues of oppression?"
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Leadership by Disabled BIPOC
Just as is the case in other professional areas, institutional racism and white privilege have created disadvantages for Black, Indigenous, people of color to advance in leadership roles in Disability Rights law, policy, and academia. In support of the essential goals of equity and diversity, our third guiding principle asks, "Are we providing space for Disabled Black, Indigenous, people of color to lead?"