Across India, change leaders committed to better lives for people with developmental and psychosocial disability are talking and learning about Social Role Valorization, a powerful set of ideas about how to assist people to have full, rich, meaningful lives. SRV provides a high-order framework for understanding the society in which we live, and the place people with disabilities tend to hold within in. As well, SRV thinking is accompanied by very practical implementation strategies to help people with disabilities have access to the good things of life.

Across the world, most valued people have some level of choice and voice in their lives, perhaps not about everything, but about many things. We make many daily decisions, express our opinions freely, and often have leeway to steer our lives in one direction or another, to take some risks, and to stretch ourselves. Somehow, typical people often feel licensed to control and manage people with disabilities. A quick study of oppressed and marginalized people shows without a doubt that the personal power of devalued people is often tamped down or even completely suppressed.