Charlie Carr is an authentic disability rights pioneer who has been active in the independent living and disability rights community for over 40 years. He was institutionalized for seven years in his youth and fought his way out by cofounding the Boston Center for Independent Living in 1974. He went on to start his own Independent Living Center, the Northeast Independent Living Program in Lawrence, MA in 1980 and grew it to become a premier ILC nationally. In 2007, he entered public service and was the commissioner of the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission until 2015. Today, he is working as a consultant and educator promoting the full integration of people with disabilities into societywith particular emphasis on youth engagement and empowerment with the ADA generation.

Brief Historical Timeline

After his spinal cord injury in 1968 Charlie was forced to go to  the Massachusetts Hospital School, an institutional school, from grades 10-12 where he was separated from his family and friends. He channeled his anger into getting good grades and graduated valedictorian in 1971. In his graduation speech he said that the school should be "torn down and everyone should be set free". This was met with boos from a few but then the audience erupted into cheering. He fled the auditorium stage and didn't return to the high school for a good 12 years. But, there were no Independent Living Centers or other community-based supports upon graduation so he moved into another institution.

Wellington Hall

Coming right out of high school, Charlie went to Middlesex County Hospital and  was instrumental in developing an experimental program known as Wellington Hall that was  designed to resemble the Cowell Hospital residence at UC Berkeley where Ed Roberts and others were living. It was there that Charlie's leadership emerged  when he began working with other "residents" who lived there to begin the prototype of what was to become the Boston Center for Independent Living. He cowrote the proposal for a Massachusetts Personal Care Assistance program and made formal requests for accessible subsidized housing units in East Boston and Medford to the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency. He spoke to Ed  Roberts on several occasions to seek guidance and was mentored by Fred Fay and, in 1974, BCIL was founded. That was Charlie's ticket to freedom and a pathway out of institutionalization for thousands into community living with long-term services and supports.

 Boston Center for Independent Living

After the prototype became a reality, he moved out into his own apartment with Personal Care Assistants in 1975 and never looked back. His first taste of activism was a planned overthrow of the BCIL Board of Directors to ensure that he and his good friend Joe Tringali and others would control the way the organization ran. This was a turning point in BCIL's history and brought to bear the true meaning of consumer control. He later became President of the board and worked with his peers to shape the agency model to be more in line with CIL Berkeley but because of the differences in funding and other issues related to administering the PCA program it took on more of a medical model than the group had hoped. After going through two Executive Directors that were failures, a vote came for the third; Charlie's block lost and a non disabled director was hired. Six months later he left and went to start his own Independent Living Center in Lawrence, MA.

 Northeast Independent Living Program

Charlie got his chance to start an Independent Living Center that truly reflected CIL when he founded  the Northeast Independent Living Program in 1980. It was the fourth ILC in Massachusetts and very strong in cross disability and both individual and systems advocacy. NILP was the first in the state to develop specific programs serving youth in transition and providing IL services to Deaf and hard of hearing consumers. A few years later it formally started serving psychiatric survivors using a combination of peer oriented IL services and community organizing and still remains a statewide model. NILP eventually became a national model as declared by the World Institute on Disability and the early 2000's. Charlie emerged as a local and national leader when he was involved in founding the first unified voice for Independent Living Centers nationally.

 National Council of Independent Living

With federal funding now available to 10 states nationally, Independent Living Centers were growing by leaps and bounds but there was no national presence. After a series of early meetings with national leaders, NCIL was incorporated in 1982 with Charlie as a founding member and he was elected as Regional I representative and then Internal Vice President. In that role he chaired the newly created Legislative and Advocacy committee that would go on to shape important laws such as the Fair Housing Act, Air Carriers Access Act, Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. He stepped down in 1991 after passage of the ADA and went back to NILP to continue growing and refining the organization.

 Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission

After many years of community organizing and political advocacy, Charlie was invited by newly elected governor Deval Patrick to serve as commissioner of the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Commission in 2007. He went right to work and flipped the agency's paradigm by moving it away from being a Vocational Rehabilitation agency to a Community Living agency with employment as the key to economic self-sufficiency. He began a process to diversify the over 800 employees through a Diversity Council to reflect the communities that the agency serves and broadened the Community Living funding base by including Home and Community Based Services waivers to transition people with disabilities out of nursing homes into the community.  Charlie pushed the envelope of competitive, integrated employment and formally went after federal contractors to fulfill their requirement to hire qualified people with disabilities with the full support of the federal Office of Federal Contract Compliance Program and also created new vocational rehabilitation positions that had human resources backgrounds to engage employers statewide creating a new pipeline for MRC's job seekers. He also developed an aggressive youth engagement strategy to reach out to young adults between the ages of 16-24 to get them actively involved in community living and breaking the bonds of poverty by going to work through paid internships and permanent jobs rather than living on public benefits.  After eight years at the helm he stepped down in March 2015.

Management Consulting

Charlie has now moved into the realm of private consulting for public and private entities where he is focuses on turnaround management, strategic planning, teaching, legislative advocacy and public speaking.