Thanks, Dr. Braddock!

We mentioned last month that Dr. David Braddock, Ph.D., was recently named a 2011 recipient of the University of Colorado's Thomas Jefferson award, one of the university's highest honors. Dr. Braddock is Executive Director of CU's Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities, and has been a longtime supporter of Imagine! and our SmartHomes project. Learn more about Dr. Braddock and this prestigious honor by clicking here.

During his acceptance speech, Dr. Braddock said some very nice things about Imagine!’s SmartHomes project. Take a look below:

Were Thomas Jefferson living today, I believe he would stand for equal protection under the law and basic fairness and opportunity for the 55 million people with disabilities living in our country. He would likely stand as well for the additional one billion persons with disabilities living as outcasts primarily in the developing nations of the world. In recent years, we have finally begun to make promising strides toward equality of opportunity for people with disabilities and their families in the United States and in the Western World generally. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, however, has been ratified by 98 countries, but it has yet to be ratified by the United States.

For enlightened disability policy and practice, we need look no farther than the local developmental disabilities service provider here in Boulder and Broomfield Counties known as Imagine!. Under John Taylor and Mark Emery's exceptional leadership, Imagine! recently opened the nation's first two SmartHomes for people with developmental disabilities right here in Boulder and Longmont. These homes were explicitly constructed to empower people with developmental disabilities through the application of advanced support technologies.

Thanks, Dr. Braddock, for the kind words and your dedicated support for some of our most vulnerable citizens!