Like a lot of people who traverse the Howard Frankland Bridge on a daily basis, Olivia Babis can’t wait for self-driving cars to go mainstream.She has an uncommon reason for such enthusiasm, though.
Babis, 38, was born without arms, a condition commonly referred to as a congenital amputation. Still, she drives a minivan across the bridge from where she lives in Tampa to her office just east of St. Petersburg’s Kenwood area.
She has worked as the top organizer for Florida Consumer Action Network, a nonprofit that advocates on social and economic justice issues, since last summer.
An array of modifications to her minivan costing $60,000 allows her to drive with her feet, which function largely like hands.
With her left foot she operates a joystick that tells the car to accelerate and brake; it also makes the steering wheel turn.
With her right foot she pushes buttons on a tablet to shift the car’s transmission from forward to reverse to park.
“My car’s so close it should just drive itself, especially driving from Tampa to St. Pete all the time, over that bridge,” she said.
Two things are obvious about Babis when one talks with her.
One, she’s fiercely independent.
She says when she was learning to do basic tasks with her feet when she was little, she wasn’t a fan of being taught by a physical therapist who could get up and open doors after their session using fully functional arms and hands. It didn’t make any sense to Babis.
“I was looking up like, how are you trying to explain how to do things to me?” she said. “I’m going to figure this out on my own. I’m going to do it my own way that works for me. Stop trying to tell me how to do things.”
She grew up in Polk County, where she was initially lumped into a catch-all class for special-needs kids regardless of their academic capabilities; she had to take an IQ test just to get into regular classes.
“There was no reason for me not to be in a regular education classroom,” she said. “There was nothing wrong with my brain. My brain worked just fine.”
Once she got there, she excelled academically. Unlike many of her peers with physical disability, she graduated with a 3.6 GPA and attended George Washington University.
“A lot of people with disabilities took kind of a defeatist attitude. They dropped out of school or they graduated high school but they did nothing afterwards,” she said. “I guess it was just kind of that independent ‘I’m going to do this and if you tell me not to that’s going to make me do it that much more’ kind of attitude.”
So she does everything on her own, largely with her feet, and says she doesn’t want to be congratulated for just doing what’s expected of her just because she was born different.
“Just accomplishing goals at work, you get that surprised, ‘Wow, you did that,’ like it’s so surprising that I did what was expected of me,” she said. “Or I exceeded expectations. I don’t know how much of that is my disability or just sexism.”
“She wants to be defined by what she can accomplish,” said Gary Stein, a healthcare advocate and blogger for Huffington Post and Context Florida, who knows Babis through her work with FCAN.
At her desk at the FCAN office, Babis scrolls through her smartphone with her toes. She wears glasses, but at one point wore contacts, which she said she used to apply using her toes until dry eyes made her switch to glasses.
Her other obvious quality is her strong empathy for those who are disadvantaged or discriminated against.
“She’s an extremely bright and passionate individual who strives to make the world better,” Stein said. “Not just for herself but for everyone else.”
Through her work with FCAN, she is constantly organizing and attending activist workshops, rallies and press conferences, where she speaks passionately about issues involving equality and fairness. At the start of the legislative session earlier this month, as part of an Awake the State rally to draw attention to key issues lawmakers are set to discuss (or ignore), she talked to reporters about the need for Medicaid expansion.
She told CL that growing up with a disability, and all the social stigmatization and misunderstanding that come with it, made her more compassionate rather than alienated. It was a large factor in her choice to work for progressive nonprofits (she worked at a Planned Parenthood branch in Virginia before FCAN).
She never sought to advocate solely on disability issues.
“I’m just more about equity for people in general,” she said. “I don’t necessarily want to stick up just for people like me. I think some people had a traumatic issue growing up and that’s how they got into nonprofits or they got into advocacy work, and everybody has a story to share. That’s how we all get sucked into this. But we’ve all seen horrible things happen to other people, too, and I don’t want to see that happen to anybody, whether it’s due to disabilities or racial issues or religion or whatever is. Discrimination is wrong regardless of what the background is behind it.”
In recent weeks Babis felt compelled to weigh in on a matter directly concerning her, after state lawmakers drew up a bill that could call the future of the state’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation into question.
Vocational rehab is a program that helps people with disabilities or other challenges, like addiction, seek and maintain employment. That could mean something like job skills training or, in Babis’s case, heavy medical equipment.
The program pays for her car modification as well as 20 percent of the cost of her $10,000 wheelchair, which she uses so she can open doors and push elevator buttons with her toes.
“It’s easier to use your hands if you’re not walking on them, which is kind of how I explain it to people,” she said.
She said the car and wheelchair each has about a ten-year life expectancy, which means her services cost the program an average of $6,200 a year.
She contacted CL out of concern over Senate Bill 802, which ostensibly is aimed at improving vocational rehabilitation, but could sunset the program if it doesn’t improve. It’s a bill Stein called “a line in the sand,” but said it could be innocuous as long as the department can meet certain improvement milestones, such as demonstrating it has employed more people.
State Rep. Blaise Ingoglia, the State Republican Party Chair and the bill’s House sponsor, said in an email the bill is needed because Florida falls short when it comes to the number of job placements per $1 million spent, and the program has more overhead than its counterparts in California, New York or Texas.
“In short, we are not doing as effective a job as we could in helping persons with unique abilities find and maintain employment,” he wrote. “The deadline language in the bill shows how serious we are about better outcomes for some of our most precious citizens by giving the option to the Legislature to take the administration of the program out from under the Division of Vocational Rehab and place it under another purview [under the state] if specific performance is not met.”
Still, Babis and other activists are afraid of what will happen if worse comes to worst.
“If you read the bill, it’s basically saying disassemble it,” said Babis. “Whether private industry steps in, [or the federal government does] block grants — because voc-rehab is kind of a federal-state quasi-department, kind of like Medicaid runs.”
She said she’s worried that if the program changes, she and people like her could lose the services they depend on to maintain employment rather than rely on government assistance like food stamps, Medicaid and Social Security.
“My $6,200 a year is far less than what it would be otherwise, and I do contribute,” she said. “I am a valuable member of society and I deserve to be treated that way, as anybody else that is using those services and those programs.”
Her minivan is seven years old, and her car, which she has to buy new so there’s a lower risk of mechanical issues, is eight years old, which means she’ll be in the market for the vital equipment soon.
“Obviously I’m very capable of working,” she said. “I’m very intelligent. I went to college. I’m capable of accomplishing things. Obviously I need a little more assistance than most people to do those things.”
Senate Bill 802 and its House companion are moving through the legislature at the moment, and Babis says she’ll be keeping a close eye on it.