Marilyn Golden

Marilyn Golden seated in front of book shelves.

Marilyn Golden is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund (DREDF), our nation’s foremost national law and policy center on disability civil rights, with offices in Berkeley, California and Washington, D.C.

She has been closely involved with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) throughout all the stages of its proposal and passage and now during its implementation. She directed the ADA Training and Information Network, a training project funded by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ) from 1992 – 1994 to develop a network of 400 ADA specialists with disabilities. In the same project, she further served as the lead trainer for each of its eight week-long training programs. She has directed and led numerous other in-depth ADA training programs that have given thousands of people comprehensive knowledge on how to make the ADA a reality. She is the principal author of the DREDF publication The ADA, an Implementation Guide, DREDF’s highly respected ADA curriculum.

Since the ADA’s passage, Ms. Golden has continued to play a key role in policy development on a federal level in the areas of transportation and architectural barriers, as a strong and effective advocate for people with disabilities. She was appointed by President Bill Clinton to the U.S. Access Board in 1996, serving until 2005. She was recognized as a White House Champion of Change in Transportation by President Barack Obama in 2014. And she’s been a member of three federal policy advisory committees: the Rail Vehicle Accessibility Advisory Committee (U.S. Access Board, 2013-2015), the ADAAG (Americans with Disabilities Act Architectural Guidelines) Review Advisory Committee (U.S. Access Board, 1994 – 1996), and the Urban Mass Transportation Administration’s ADA Federal Advisory Committee to assist in developing the DOT ADA regulation (U.S. Department of Transportation, 1991). She has also led the struggle for many of the policy victories during and since the ADA to provide better public transportation for people with disabilities.

Pursuant to DREDF’s position opposing the legalization of physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia since 1999, Golden quickly became nationally prominent in that struggle. She took a lead role in conceiving, producing, and leading the Disability Rights Leadership Institute on Bioethics in 2014. She has authored many of the key articles explaining why assisted suicide laws are dangerously harmful public policy, and worked in many successful campaigns to defeat assisted suicide legislation across the U.S. She has also represented the disability community in many debates and dialogues on the subject.

Golden was the principal author of the National Council on Disability’s 2015 report, Transportation Update: Where We’ve Gone and What We’ve Learned.

She served as Project Manager for a Federal Transit Administration (FTA) 2015 research study, Accessible Transit Services for All, which identified practices that have reduced ADA paratransit costs, improved efficiency, and increased the mobility of people with disabilities.

She was the principal author of the Topic Guides on ADA Transportation, also for FTA and published in 2010, as well as other transportation studies.

Her management and leadership skills were recognized early in her career when she was hired at age 25 as Director of Access California, a City of Oakland, California resource center on architectural and communications accessibility. She served for nine years in that capacity before joining the DREDF staff in 1988. During the same period, she served in a volunteer capacity as Co-Coordinator of the Disabled International Support Effort, which provided material aid and technical assistance to disability organizations in developing countries.

Her involvement in international disability rights has continued since the ADA’s passage. She has been called upon to share her knowledge with audiences in South Africa, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Spain, Costa Rica, the European Union, and at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China.

Ms. Golden attended Brandeis University, from which she graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa. Soon thereafter she acquired a disability and became deeply involved in the disability rights movement.