Amber Smock

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT AMBER SMOCK

Amber Smock is Access Living’s Vice President of Advocacy. She began her career at Access Living in 2005 as the Youth Leadership Coordinator, becoming the Director of Advocacy in 2010 and Vice President in 2023. Amber has a strong background in both disability community organizing and disability policy advocacy. Within her team, Amber fosters collaboration across advocacy approaches and issue areas, in order to pursue some of the most under-addressed problems facing people with disabilities. Amber and the Advocacy Department are responsible for executing Access Living’s policy, community organizing, and issue education, with a focus on problems affecting disabled people of color. She guides Access Living’s strategic advocacy efforts at the local, state, and national levels across a wide range of disability topics, in collaboration with the Manager of Organizing and the Manager of Policy and Government Affairs. Amber currently serves as the Vice Chair of the National Council on Independent Living, Vice Chair of the Illinois Medicaid Advisory Committee, and as a Commissioner on the Cook County Commission on Human Rights. She also supports Access Living’s international disability exchange projects, having worked with advocates in countries such as Japan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Australia and New Zealand. Amber is a skilled presenter and trainer, a member of ADA25 and Leadership Greater Chicago, and a recipient of numerous local and national awards for her disability advocacy. She has trained six classes of Illinois Partners in Policymaking students on community organizing.Amber is a proud member of the Deaf community who grew up in mainstream schools, learned ASL as a young adult, and now relies on lip-reading, ASL interpreters, text, and video relay technologies for communication access.