For the past eight months, Timotheus “T.J.” Gordon Jr. has been a Dinah F. Cohen DREAM Fellow with the National Disability Mentoring Coalition. During his time with the program, he created a new guidebook on how campus intramural sports and recreation programs could attract and include students, staff, and faculty with disabilities.

In this capstone presentation, TJ will explain his research and key recommendations for recreation programs. He will also talk about how his experience and love for sports, along with his insights on sports and disability, led him to create this guidebook in the first place.

About the presenter: Timotheus “T.J.” Gordon Jr., MFA, MS, is a research associate at the Institute on Disability and Human Development at University of Illinois at Chicago. Gordon uses his passion for self-advocacy, racial equity, disability culture, and autism acceptance to create webinars, training sessions, and publications on autism and race, inclusion in communities of color, exploration of sexuality in the disability community, coping with COVID-19 pandemic, mental health emergency services, and more.

He is also a co-founder of Chicagoland Disabled People of Color Coalition (Chicagoland DPOCC), which is supported by the Institute on Disability and Human Development. Chicagoland DPOCC is a group of disabled people of color in the Chicagoland area that promote disability pride, self-advocacy, and inclusion in communities of color throughout the Chicagoland area.

In addition to his self-advocacy work, Gordon has also written essays and reviews related to disability and race. His writings appear in the Disability Studies Review, the “All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism” anthology, and ADA 30 in Color. He is the creator and blogger for The Black Autist, a multi-platform blog that illustrates news and topics surrounding autistic people in the African Diaspora, including Black communities in the United States.

Gordon is a member of the 2020 National Disability Mentoring Coalition Hall of Fame. He is also a part of the Harriet Tubman Collective.