Maryland woman starts magazine to inspire young disabled people

From The Baltimore Sun:

Zarifa Roberson (pictured) was supposed to be taking a break from studying for the law school admissions exam, clearing her head with a stop at a Barnes & Noble near her home in Philadelphia. Soon enough, the break turned into another project, a project that has now entered a new phase in Baltimore.

This was the summer of 2003, and she had recently graduated from college, was studying for the LSAT and browsing the store's magazine selections. There were magazines for bikers and hikers, runners, travelers, eaters, golfers -- just about every category of person one could think of, except disabled people, a group to which Roberson has belonged since she was born with a rare condition that contracts joints throughout the body, dislocates hips, locks the jaw.

Roberson, who is 30 and lives in Timonium, had struggled through arthrogryposis multiplex congenita with years of painful physical therapy and many surgeries, gaining the ability to walk when she was 4. Now this magazine rack seemed to be presenting another challenge.

She took it on. She saw the need for a magazine and decided she'd produce one.

She called it "i.d.e.a.l.," an acronym for "Individuals with Disabilities Express About Life," and put the emphasis on young disabled people.

"Talking with young people with disabilities is kind of disheartening because they don't know what to do with their lives," said Roberson. "Not everyone can be the next Stevie Wonder. This is why I started the publication."

After putting out two issues almost entirely on her own in 2005 and 2006, Roberson had to put the magazine on hold when she started graduate school at Coppin State University. Now that Roberson has completed her master's in education -- she decided not to pursue law school -- the magazine is back with a fresh look, a bigger part-time staff and in partnership with League Industries, a division of the League for People with Disabilities, an organization founded in Baltimore in 1927.

The launch party for the publication was held at the league headquarters on Cold Spring Lane on Friday, complete with a disc jockey and lunch.

David A. Greenberg, the league's president and chief executive officer, called the magazine "a match of the mission" of the organization, which for years has been running a commercial print shop where disabled people work.

He said the league paid for the cost of printing 1,000 copies of the new issue, but the hope is that Roberson will eventually be able to drum up enough advertisers and subscribers to cover the cost of publishing. The quarterly goes for $3 a copy, sold at the league and through Roberson, who works full-time in Washington for the Rehabilitation Services Administration.

Roberson is listed as the magazine's "CEO/Founder," but she's also written half of the 10 articles in the new issue, which runs 23 pages. First-person accounts and reported stories convey the struggles and achievements of disabled people across the country.

There's a story about a Philadelphia man who now works for that city's Mayor's Commission on People with Disabilities, more than 20 years after he was paralyzed from the waist down by a gunshot wound he suffered as a teenager. Another story reports on a Brooklyn, N.Y., man who is working as a DJ, despite the fact that he's been deaf since he was a child.

Along with reported stories, Roberson contributed a first-person piece about how her disability and her bisexuality complicate her personal life. It's the sort of frank treatment of the lives of disabled people that she feels has been missing from available publications, and was missing even from the first two issues of "i.d.e.a.l."

"I'm my own worst critic," she said. "I don't think it was as relatable to me" in her life as a disabled person. Her hope is that disabled people reading the new magazine will find their lives reflected in it, "so people will disabilities can say 'Oh my God, I'm not the only one going through this.' "