Left to right: Angelina Alpert and Ashley Donham.
The University of Missouri-Kansas City’s Institute for Human Development has taken a giant step in building its Interdisciplinary Leadership in Disability Studies Graduate Certificate program by awarding its first two scholarships to Angelina Alpert and Ashley Donham. Alpert is an employee at the Institute for Human Development.
Funded through a generous grant from The Rehabilitation Institute Foundation here in Kansas City, IHD awarded Alpert and Donham each with the Vivian Shepherd and Merrill Joslin Scholarship for Disability Studies, which covers full ILDS-related tuition costs for two of ILDS students for two semesters. The scholarship required that recipients must already work or plan to work in the disability field and have a grade-point average of 3.0 or higher.
The first recipient, IHD’s own Angelina Alpert, continues to impact policy work and systems change on Sheli Reynold’s team. Her primary project is working on the No Wrong Door Systems contract.
The second recipient, Ashley Donham, works for the Utah Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Substance Use and Mental Health. Donham says she aspires and works toward “improving state systems to compassionately see and more effectively support individuals with mental illness and developmental and intellectual disabilities; these systems include, but are not limited to, physical and behavioral healthcare, child and family services, specialized courts, and corrections.”
Watch these two future leaders as they grow throughout and after their time within the ILDS program.
Learn more about the ILDS Graduate Certificate Program at ILDS@umkc.edu.
