The Cromwell Center for Disabilities Awareness is dedicated to the purpose that no person with any kind of disability will ever again experience the profound isolation in life and anonymity at death as Jeremiah Cromwell. (Read more about Jeremiah below.) Our mission is to promote safe, respectful and inclusive schools and communities.

We don’t focus on specific disabilities or lead“show and tell” or simulations. Instead, we change attitudes. At first, our hands-on activities may seem to have little to do with disabilities. Through questioning, facilitation, and interaction, we help people discover on their own – and from each other – positive attitudes, understanding, and respect of differences.

Unlike other programs that focus primarily on physical challenges, The Cromwell Center’s programs address all disabilities — learning, behavioral, emotional, developmental, and physical.

The Cromwell Center was founded by Jamie Kaplan and Irv Shapell and named in honor of Jeremiah Cromwell, a young resident of The Maine School for the Feeble Minded (later called Pineland) who died of appendicitis in 1928 at age 14. No family member claimed his body, and his grave at Pineland was marked only by a small cement cylinder stamped with his patient ID number. In the late 1950s, the cement was replaced with a modest tombstone bearing Jeremiah’s name and the years of his brief life.

Although there are no existing records of what type of disability Jeremiah Cromwell had, we know that his life and death were similar to hundreds of thousands of children and adults with physical and developmental disabilities who lived and died in institutions throughout the United States over a 100-year period.