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The Ed Roberts Campus will be a good neighbor to South Berkeley  

Editor: 

Ed Roberts, one of the founders of the Independent Living/Civil Rights Movement for people with disabilities, once said, “There is nothing like building a movement on success.  

Whenever we have brought ourselves together, whenever we have joined various disabilities together, we find our strength. Our strength is in our unity.” 

When Ed died in 1995 we lost a great unifier but not our belief in the importance of individuals, organizations and agencies working together in coalition.  

As a memorial to Ed Roberts, the ERC embodies the values of the Independent Living Movement by establishing a center dedicated to fostering collaboration and improving the services and opportunities for people with disabilities locally and worldwide. 

The ERC is a nonprofit partnership of nine disability organizations that will share a home. The ERC will cluster a range of disability services in one location and provide convenient, easy access via public transportation.  

The ERC will be a state-of-the-art, universally designed, transit-oriented campus located at the Ashby BART Station in south Berkeley.  

The facility will house the offices of the nine partners.  

We hope to include a conference center, a library on the Disability Movement, a computer/media resource center, a gym/fitness center, a café, a small children’s play center, and a mix of neighborhood-serving retail and office lease space.  

All summer long, outreach to the neighborhood accelerated as ERC community liaisons traveled door-to-door introducing the project, distributing the ERC newsletter, and listening to people’s comments and concerns.  

We held several informal “kitchen chats” in neighborhood homes to share information about the ERC and to  

learn what the community would like to see along the 

Adeline corridor.  

The neighborhood has a strong residential character with an active community.  

The community is concerned about the type of development planned for the BART property, the traffic it will generate, and the impact it will have on the neighborhood especially in terms of parking.  

The ERC is committed to integrating these concerns into its plans. 

Currently, the ERC is poised to carry out the first phase of the architectural design.  

It is the level of design that enables the community to contribute valuable input that will shape the design of the ERC.  

This phase is the most creative portion of the design work, the point where the design team lays out how the facility might look, fit onto the site and connect to the neighborhood.  

On September 13th, over 70 community members met with the architects for the first of a series of design workshops to develop a vision for the site.  

At that meeting we got many comments from the community about the scale and location of the ERC.  

Please be assured that the suggestions of the community will have an important influence on the design of the ERC facility.  

The partner organizations are very interested in being good neighbors, and welcome the opportunity to share ideas and discuss options. We are also interested in finding ways that neighbors can participate in the programs offered by the ERC and welcome suggestions that could possibly be incorporated in our plans.  

We will convene another community meeting as soon as the architects have some design concepts for everyone to consider.  

We are excited by this process and welcome the community’s active participation – that’s what we mean when we say, “our strength is in our unity.” 

Joni Breves, chair, Ed Roberts Campus 

Berkeley