Harriet Rechtman: Advocate for people with disabilities

“Life is like that. Every day is a new thing,” Harriet Rechtman said, dismissing any suggestion that the three decades she has spent as an advocate for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities is extraordinary. Sitting at the dining room table of the Woodland Hills home where she has lived since 1974, Rechtman speaks frankly of a life of helping others steered more by her willingness to live serendipitously than by any forethought. 

 

Until her second son, Jamie, had seizures while still an infant in the early 1970s, Rechtman had never thought about working with people with disabilities. “I had no knowledge of it, no experience with it, didn’t know anybody growing up,” she said. But then she begins to talk at length about how a trust works, how various government agencies assist people with disabilities, and how her opinion on group homes versus apartment living has changed, among many other topics. She learned these things over many years of lovingly caring for Jamie.  

 

Rechtman’s first professional job in disability care came when Jamie was much older, when a man named Stefen Sorsoli hired her to open Los Angeles and Thousand Oaks operations of an organization called Work Training Programs based in Santa Barbara.

 

After a few years, Rechtman left her position with Sorsoli, who had become something of a second father to Jamie, and on her way home from her last day she stopped by the North Los Angeles County Regional Center to say goodbye to its director, Jim Shorter, who was preparing to depart for law school. 

 

His question to her — “What’s the worst thing you ever saw happen with a family at Work Training Program?” — and their mutual realization that there was no existing long-term care program that worked well with adult clients, many of whom no longer had families, is the moment Rechtman points to as the origin of the Foundation for Advocacy, Conservatorship and Trust (FACT). 

 

As they worked with a group of Regional Center directors and local attorneys to put together the new organization, Rechtman grew tired of waiting for the technical details to be worked out, so she began advising clients out of her own home. At first, Rechtman worked mostly with people she had met while raising Jamie. Families trusted her advice, coming as it did from a fellow parent of a developmentally disabled child.

 

Because of another chance conversation with Shorter a decade later, Rechtman returned to the organization she had founded. For 15 years, until June 2014, Rechtman stood at the helm of FACT — advising families on the financial, legal and personal components of raising developmentally disabled children, and often, through FACT, managing those areas once the children were grown and their families were no longer around. Characteristically, Rechtman never took a salary for her work.

 

Although she is now retired, Rechtman admits that she has not stopped working. “All I need to do for [FACT] now, which they would like for me to do, is to find them money,” she says, laughing.